The lawsuit comes as a state law allowing people to commit assisted suicide goes into effect next month.
A group of Catholic physicians and a bishop filed a lawsuit against the state of Illinois on Tuesday, challenging the state’s assisted suicide law.
The End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act, signed into law by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker in December 2025, allows terminally ill people to secure medication and end their lives. The law comes into effect on Sept. 12 this year. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, took issue with the bill’s rules for state physicians when dealing with people seeking assisted suicide.
According to the bill, the attending physician is obliged to inform the patient about potential risks and benefits of self-administering the medication that would bring about death. In case a healthcare professional is unwilling to carry out a person’s request for aid in dying, they must refer the individual to another professional who is “able and willing,” the bill said.
None of the plaintiffs in the case—four physicians, one bishop, and a Lutheran nursing facility—“can in good conscience comply” with the requirements of the bill, the lawsuit said.
“Their basic commitment to preserving patient health, along with their shared Christian faith, compels them to use all reasonable means to save life and tell the truth. Accordingly, they sincerely object both morally and religiously to facilitating assisted suicide in any way,” the complaint said, adding that this was consistent with the Hippocratic Oath of doing no harm to patients and refraining from advising patients on how to commit suicide.
“Plaintiffs thus cannot and will not comply with compelled speech mandates to promote the so-called ‘benefits’ of assisted suicide as a legitimate ‘treatment option’ even for ‘terminally ill’ patients or refer them to a third party for the specific purpose of intentionally killing themselves,” the lawsuit said.
The Act’s requirements pose a risk of “career-ending” civil, administrative, and criminal consequences for healthcare professionals, according to the complaint. It forces plaintiffs to either violate their faith or, if they choose to hold to their faith, end up violating state law, the lawsuit said.
As such, the lawsuit said that the Act threatens to punish and potentially force plaintiffs and like-minded healthcare professionals to move out of Illinois, and this would harm the patients in the state who would require the care of these professionals.
