In the waning days of this session — as I lamented the uncertainty and unfairness of New York’s legislative process — a volunteer advocate who is also a hospice doctor shared a new perspective that I will carry into this post-session summer: Approach this work every day as though the bill will never pass.

This may sound like a strange way for a driven campaign director to think about her work (and make no mistake: no one questions whether the bill will pass, just when), but what my doctor friend was trying to show me is that there is joy, satisfaction, and value in empowering New Yorkers to chart their own end-of-life journeys, even when it doesn’t result in legislative victory. Our movement is much more than lobbying. It is a place for catharsis, healing, and community.

The results of the November 2024 election send a new group of lawmakers to Albany, and as we mark a decade of working towards this major social change in New York, I am encouraging all of us to see 2025 as the beginning of a new chapter that will bring the compassionate option of medical aid in dying to the Empire State. , I believe this will stand as a watershed year in New York’s end-of-life options movement.

Momentum for medical aid in dying in New York has grown to unprecedented heights, as our progress shows.We expanded our coalition of statewide and local grassroots groups that support the bill to close to 60, including The New York State Council of Churches, the New York State Association of Counties, the New York State Bar Association and The Medical Society of the State of New York (MSSNY). Just recently, the New York State Nurses Association also adopted a resolution in favor of the bill.

The importance of the Medical Society’s support cannot be overstated. The two largest physician organizations in the state — MSSNY and The New York State Academy of Family Physicians — now support medical aid-in-dying legislation. This not only removes a barrier for New York lawmakers whose objection was based on MSSNY’s previous position, but also dismisses the assertion that no major medical associations support this compassionate option.

We demonstrated again via polling that a majority of New Yorkers (72%) support medical aid in dying. A YouGov poll conducted in January showed strong majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents, as well as strong majority support among every racial, religious, and regional demographic.

We engaged thousands of new and existing supporters across the state through a robust social media presence and digital advertising campaign, generating thousands of messages to lawmakers.

Perhaps most importantly, we maintained a consistent presence in Albany with lobby days, and eventually demonstrations, held every week.

As lawmakers wrapped up their annual budget negotiations in May with no indication of whether our bill would be heard, our advocates were rightfully fed up with inaction.We scheduled in-person lobby days every week through the end of session and invited every supporter willing and able to come to Albany. While at its peak the COVID pandemic necessitated virtual meetings, we know it is much harder to ignore a terminally ill constituent sitting in your office.

Legislative staff and advocates for other issues pending in Albany in an elevator in the Legislative Office Building with two C&C volunteer advocates Winston Hagborg and Thad Mirer (who is also the president of Death with Dignity-Albany

As the weeks wore on without a vote, our advocates pushed for escalation.

On May 7, our advocates occupied all seven elevators in the Legislative Office Building and the four elevators in the Capitol. Our goal was to make sure everyone in the building that day — lawmakers, legislative staff, advocates for other issues and state workers — learned about our campaign to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act, and to get many of them to join our campaign to ask lawmakers to pass the bill.

We were kicked off the elevators and came close to getting arrested, but in the time we worked the elevators, we couldn’t be ignored. The vast majority of people we met on those rides shared their support for the bill, and our legislative co-sponsors were re-energized.

The attention prompted questions from the press that left legislative leaders grasping to justify why the bill was being ignored. Speaking to Politico, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said, “I believe this is a robust discussion, and obviously we’re not there yet. It’s a matter of information. It’s a matter of education, and then we get to see if we can actually do things that change life for the better.”

Her comments infuriated our advocates, who have been participating in discussions, providing information and educating lawmakers and communities in every region of the state for years. To them, it seemed that the Senate Majority Leader herself was the only one NOT engaging in a robust discussion on the bill. So in response to her comments, on May 15 we stood outside the Senate chamber and read aloud more than 240 pieces of literature that we’ve shared with lawmakers over the last decade, including the stories of 26 advocates who spent the final days of their lives urging them to pass the bill.

Volunteer and past president of the Women’s Bar Association Rachel Kretser outside the Senate chamber participating in our “Speak Out!” by sharing her own story and reading the stories of advocates who died advocating for the bill.

One of the major challenges with a stalled legislative campaign is keeping the campaign in the public eye. Political news people look for a “hook” to get readers interested, and a stuck bill isn’t it. It became clear that the only way for us to get press attention, and for us to start to move the bill, was to step it up another notch. So our volunteers planned a civil disobedience action.

Barb Thomas, who’s been with us every single day at the Capitol for 10 years, is led from the New York Assembly chamber following our demonstration.

The group included terminally ill people, hospice volunteers, grieving family members, people living with disabilities, and octogenarians — none of whom had ever been arrested before. We met with attorneys and held a training session on civil disobedience and safety. On Tuesday, May 21, we smuggled a handmade banner into the Assembly gallery, and during floor debate we unfurled it and began to chant: “Stop the suffering, pass the bill!”

We stopped proceedings for around four minutes. It was scarier than any of us expected. Thirty New York State Troopers were lined up behind us, and one by one we were detained, led out of the chamber, and eventually out of the building. Those four minutes were among the most consequential of our campaign to date.

Lawmakers and the press took immediate notice, and for the first time in a decade the New York Times wrote about the bill and our advocates. They quoted Jules Netherland, a Bronx advocate living with stage 4 breast cancer who was among those detained.

“I’m not someone who enjoys conflict or who has much experience in civil disobedience,” they told reporters, “but I really believed this was the only way to get people’s attention.”

The vast majority of our legislative champions were galvanized to push even harder for the bill, far surpassing a handful of lawmakers who wanted to punish us for the demonstration. The vast majority of lawmakers I spoke with after the demonstration told me that it was a necessary step, and what happened next proved that to be true.

In the days following the Assembly demonstration, we brought posters of the advocates who have died while urging lawmakers to pass the bill and set them up in the hallway between the Capitol and the Legislative Office Building with flameless candles. It was a powerful scene. Several champion lawmakers joined us for a symbolic sleep-in with advocates and cheered us on as we continued to show up, day after day.

One of the women who was arrested during the Assembly demonstration, Catherine O’Callaghan, shared with me that her best friend was struggling with ALS and was hopeful the bill would pass so he wasn’t forced to leave New York in order to die on his own terms. I called the Staten Island Advance to pitch them the story, and on May 30 they published “Longtime Staten Islander wants to be first person to use medical aid in dying in New York: ‘I’m suffering more than you can imagine.’”

Brian Moffett touched the hearts of every senator in the final weeks of session. The mood in the building changed, and our campaign was elevated beyond comparison. For the first time it felt like many lawmakers could associate a name and a face to the issue of end-of-life autonomy: a retired 25-year employee of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority who helped clean up Ground Zero in 2001, fed neighbors in need after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and was known to friends and family as “the grill master” before his illness.

“Every part of my day is suffering,” Brian told us in May. “I’m now having trouble breathing. I’m constantly in excruciating pain. With ALS, you don’t get better; you only get worse. Everything is getting harder by the day, and there is absolutely no reprieve from my situation.”

On Monday, June 3, Senator Jessica Scarcella-Spanton and Assemblymember Amanda Septimo joined me to visit Brian in Manhattan. It was the single most powerful experience I have ever had. I worked closely with the advocates who have died campaigning for the bill — and the terminally ill supporters currently working with us to pass the bill — but having the Senator and the Assemblymember with me on the visit to Brian and having them turn around and race back to the capitol to share the story with their colleagues was something else.

Sen. Jessica Scarcella-Spanton and Asmb. Amanda Septimo with Brian Moffett.

This man who lived his whole life as a support to others, who was known as dependable to help in any situation, told them he worried about going outside — a precaution to safeguard the privacy of other residents — because if he was bit by a mosquito he might not have the strength to scratch his itch, but he came out anyway, because he loved the feeling of the sun on his face

When we pass the bill, we will owe its success to advocates like Brian Moffett, Jules Netherland and the terminally ill advocates who came before them. Brian Moffett died on July 20. He fought every day to advocate for medical aid in dying. The Staten Island Advance recently named Brian one of Staten Island’s Brightest Lights of 2024.

Our supporters began the year unified in the belief that dying New Yorkers deserve better. After months of waffling by legislative leaders, our advocates’ voices were joined by those of the editorial board of the New York Daily News, who wrote in May:

While we respect deeply held beliefs on both sides of [the medical aid-in-dying] debate, we can’t say we respect New York’s legislative process … [Medical aid in dying], which has been shoved to the side year after year after year after year, is the latest proof that the Legislature is where important ideas that deserve careful study and earnest and honest consideration go to die slow, painful deaths.

For decades, New York’s legislative process was dubbed “three men in a room,” as the Governor and two legislative leaders negotiated in secret over what policies deserved consideration. For the first time in the state’s modern government’s nearly 250-year history two of those decision makers are women, but the convoluted nature of lawmaking in “Planet Albany” remains.

And so our work continues. We know — and a growing group of lawmakers believes — that New Yorkers deserve better. We deserve freedom to choose at life’s inevitable end, and the same end-of-life options already available to more than 1 in 5 U.S. residents, including our neighbors in Vermont and New Jersey.

We are hopeful that 2025 is our year, but it will require all of us to do everything we can, with the resources and capacity that we each individually have, to make it happen. I am committed to seeing this campaign through to its eventual success, and I hope you will stay on this journey with me. I look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events, and hope that many of you will come to Albany on January 14 to show newly-elected and returning lawmakers we won’t rest until they act.