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The 2024 Session In Review: Protecting Human Life

Written by on January 4, 2025

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New York Families Foundation’s work covers four different broad areas of public policy: Protecting human life, promoting strong families, preserving religious liberty, and proclaiming justice and mercy. This article will summarize the events of the 2024 legislative session as they relate to protecting human life.

The 2024 legislative session included one encouraging milestone and one major setback in the ongoing struggle to advance respect for human life in New York law.

The encouraging milestone is the fact that physician-assisted suicide has, for 10 consecutive years, failed to become law or to even receive a floor vote in either house of the State Legislature. Assisted suicide legislation has been introduced in every New York legislative session dating back to 2015. If legalized, assisted suicide would endanger the lives of people with disabilities, the terminally ill, and the mentally ill; would normalize assisted suicide as an acceptable response to disabilities; would encourage assisted suicide tourism; and would irreparably damage the physician-patient relationship. A compassionate society ensures that terminally ill persons receive effective medical treatment and palliative care; it does not offer them a poisonous cocktail of deadly drugs. By the grace of God, and thanks to the tireless efforts of the New York Alliance Against Assisted Suicide, this bill has still not passed.

Assisted suicide advocates ramped up their efforts to pass their bill (Bill S.2445-C-Hoylman-Sigal/A.995-C-Paulin) in 2024. Their tactics this year ranged from the obnoxious (accosting legislators in Capitol elevators) to the disruptive (creating a disturbance in the Assembly chamber on May 21 and being removed from the room) to the downright bizarre (one day, Asm. Eddie Gibbs, D-Manhattan, demonstrated alongside assisted suicide advocates by lying on a bedroll in the Capitol tunnel and inviting passers-by to lie down next to him to show their support for doctor-assisted death). In addition, advocates in yellow T-shirts demonstrated in the tunnel between the Capitol and the Empire State Plaza Concourse on a weekly basis.

The New York Alliance Against Assisted Suicide held several Capitol demonstrations of its own in the waning weeks of the legislative session; NYAAAS demonstrators from across New York wore purple T-shirts that read, “Another New Yorker Against Assisted Suicide.” In addition, the Alliance invited Peter Wolfgang of the Family Institute of Connecticut to Albany in March to give a talk entitled “Defeating Assisted Suicide in the Northeast: Lessons Learned.” Throughout the legislative session, NYAAAS participants engaged in consistent lobbying efforts directed at members of both parties.

On June 8, the legislative session ended with no action being taken on assisted suicide in the Senate or the Assembly. However, shortly before the end of the session, a leading assisted suicide advocate claimed that Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) supported the legislation and was willing to bring it to a vote. If this statement is accurate, physician-assisted suicide will once again be a major battleground issue in New York in 2025.

By far, the greatest legislative setback for Christians this year involved the Free Abortions for Out-of-Staters Act. Known as the Reproductive Freedom and Equity Grant Program, the legislation would create a grant program within the New York State Department of Health to fund abortion providers and nonprofits that facilitate abortion access. The State Senate passed the stand-alone version of this bill (Bill S.348-C-Cleare/A.361-B-Gonzalez-Rojas) on January 22, 2024.

The Free Abortions for Out-of-Staters Act was included in an April budget bill (Bill S.8307-B-Budget, Part TT), but was left out of the final version of that budget legislation. Unfortunately, a similar bill was also included in the final state education, labor, housing and family assistance budget as Bill S.8306-C-Budget/A.8806-C-Budget, Part PP. That bill was signed by Gov. Hochul on April 20, 2024 as Chapter 56 of the Laws of 2024. The law purposes to increase abortion access by “growing the capacity of abortion providers to meet present and future care needs.” In addition, the final budget appropriated $26 million for implementation of this legislation.

A life-affirming bill known as the Down Syndrome Awareness Act (Bill S.593-A-Ortt/A.4138-A-McMahon) was signed into law as Chapter 555 of the Laws of New York. This law calls for the creation of a Down syndrome awareness program that will “provide up-to-date and evidence-based information about Down syndrome…to health care providers who order tests for a pregnant woman or an infant to screen for Down syndrome.” By providing accurate information about Down syndrome to prospective parents, this bill could reduce the grievous frequency with which Down syndrome babies are aborted.

Another life-affirming bill passed the State Senate in 2024. Bill S.1159-B-Skoufis/A.9152-A-Paulin would require manufacturers of non-invasive prenatal screening tests to provide notices that test results indicating a high level of risk do not necessarily mean that an unborn baby has a genetic disorder. Such notices would also state that non-invasive prenatal screening tests are not to be used for diagnostic purposes, and that follow-up diagnostic testing is recommended when a high risk is identified. Because this legislation might reduce the number of abortions by alleviating confusion about certain prenatal test results, it is hoped that it will become law in 2025.

The Public University Emergency Contraception Vending Machines Act (Bill S.4400-C-Webb) passed the New York State Senate as well. This bill would require New York’s public college and university campuses to make emergency contraception available for sale in vending machines on campus. Emergency contraception pills sometimes act as abortion-causing drugs by preventing an embryo from implanting in the wall of a woman’s uterus; therefore, they should not be available.

Republican Sen. Jack Martins (R-Mineola) introduced a bill (Bill S.8682-Martins/A.9412-Curran) falsely claiming that an embryo that exists outside of a mother’s womb is not a human being. The Senator introduced this bill in response to an Alabama Supreme Court decision that was being used by Democrats across the country for political attacks against Republicans on the issue of in vitro fertilization. While the bill was defeated in the Assembly Health Committee (likely for partisan reasons rather than reasons of principle), it should not have been introduced in the first place.

As usual, several life-affirming bills failed to receive floor votes in 2024. Those bills include the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (Bill S.1696-Helming/A.3601-Manktelow), which would require health care practitioners to use the same degree of care in treating born-alive abortion survivors that they would use in treating other babies born at the same gestational age; the Liv Act (Bill A.3604-Manktelow), which would—with the exception of legal abortions—make it a felony to intentionally harm a pregnant woman or her unborn child; the Parental Notification Act (Bill S.2911-Murray/A.3398-DeStefano), which would require parental notification before an abortion is performed upon a minor; and a ban on taxpayer funding for abortions performed on residents of other states (Bill S.4904-Murray/A.5335-Flood).

However, several anti-life bills also failed to receive floor votes. Those bills include the Abortion Access Fund Bill (Bill A.1473-Reyes); the Public University Emergency Contraception Education Act (Bill S.7152-Parker), which would create a statewide program to promote awareness of so-called “emergency contraception” at public colleges and universities; the Reproductive Health Services Training Grant Program Act (Bill S.3060-B-Krueger/A.3279-C-Epstein), which would empower the state to provide grant funding for professional education on how to perform abortions; and the Tax Credit for Evildoers Act (Bill S.6637-Hinchey), which would provide tax incentives to persons who move to New York to provide abortions or so-called “gender-affirming care” and for persons who move to New York to obtain such procedures.

The post The 2024 Session In Review: Protecting Human Life appeared first on New York Families Foundation.

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