Mary Keen Kirchoff, M.D., et al. v. Treto, Jr.

The State of Illinois is telling doctors that caring for a severely ill or dying patient can mean offering to help end her life—and it is telling faith-based ministries that they must go along.

When Illinois's assisted suicide law takes effect on September 12, 2026, it will not merely permit the practice. It will compel physicians and religious health care facilities that object to speak about the so-called "benefits" of assisted suicide—the law's own words—and, when asked, to refer patients to someone willing to help them end their lives. It will even require them to allow their own staff to promote assisted suicide inside their walls, and to falsify death certificates to conceal how a patient died. Those who follow their conscience instead risk the loss of a license, a career, and even civil and criminal penalty.

For millennia, medicine has been bound by a simple promise: first, do no harm. The physician exists to heal the sick and comfort the dying, never to hasten death artificially. And for the Church, care for the sick and dying is not incidental to its mission but central to it—the continuation of the healing ministry of Christ, who commanded his followers to stand with the suffering to the very end. To force a doctor to point a patient toward suicide, or a religious ministry to make its own facilities and staff instruments of it, is to demand that they betray the very conscience and calling that brought them to this work.

In challenging Illinois's "End-of-Life Options" Act, Thomas More Society represents a Catholic bishop, a Lutheran nursing home, and four Catholic physicians who, across their different callings, share one conviction: that they cannot make themselves instruments of a patient's death. The four doctors have spent their careers caring for patients at their most vulnerable, and their faith forbids cooperating in assisted suicide in any form, a referral included. Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield brings this suit as the shepherd charged with keeping the Catholic hospitals in his diocese faithful to that same teaching—a matter of the Church's authority to govern its own ministries. And the Lutheran Care Center, supported by twenty area churches, has accompanied the dying for decades on the conviction that every life keeps its God-given dignity to its final hour.

No state may conscript the healer into the very act the healer is compelled by conscience and religious belief to refuse. The plaintiffs are asking the court to block Illinois's coercive mandates before the law takes effect, so that they may continue serving the sick and the dying as their faith and their profession require.