Advocates sue Colorado over suicide law they say discriminates against disabled

CNA Staff, Jul 1, 2025 / 11:36 am

A coalition of advocacy groups is suing the state of Colorado over its assisted suicide law, claiming the statute is unconstitutional for allegedly discriminating against those who suffer from disabilities. 

Filed June 30 in U.S. district court by several organizations including Not Dead Yet and the Institute for Patients’ Rights, the lawsuit describes Colorado’s assisted suicide regime as “a deadly and discriminatory system that steers people with life-threatening disabilities away from necessary lifesaving and preserving mental health care.”

In the lawsuit — spearheaded by the umbrella group End Assisted Suicide — the plaintiffs argue that the law “does not require any evaluation, screening, or treatment by a mental health professional for serious mental illness, depression, or treatable suicidality before the lethal prescription is written.”

The state legalized assisted suicide in 2016, one of several states that year to do so. The measure permits doctors to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients who wish to kill themselves.

In 2024 the state expanded the law to allow a larger number of medical officials to prescribe those drugs.

Prescribers are not required to possess expertise about the patient’s specific illness and are not required to be trained in recognizing mental health symptoms associated with the illness, the lawsuit argues.

Providers are similarly not required to help patients access alternative treatments such as palliative care and mental health treatment, according to the suit.

Colorado has created “a two-tiered medical system in which people who are suicidal receive radically different treatment responses by their providers and protections from the state” depending on a medical provider’s opinion, the lawsuit alleges, arguing that the state law violates both federal disability laws and “constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection.”

The suit asks the court to block the law under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, as well as the Affordable Care Act and the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

The Colorado law has received pushback from Catholic advocates. The state Catholic conference last year opposed the expansion of the suicide law, calling the overall statute itself “unjust,” stipulating that it “targets the most vulnerable in our society” and corrupts the practice of medicine. 

Elsewhere, Church leadership has similarly condemned euthanasia and assisted suicide. Pope Francis in 2022 said dying people need palliative care rather than suicide; the next year he condemned euthanasia as “playing with life” and “bad compassion.” 

Prior to his election as pontiff, meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV spoke out against assisted suicide, warning in 2016 that the practice “threatens the most vulnerable in society.”

Eleven other states and the District of Columbia allow assisted suicide. Most recently the New York State Legislature in June passed a law legalizing it there, though Gov. Kathy Hochul had not yet signed it as of July 1.