Last August, John Carney, then the governor of Delaware, considered a bill that he knew he couldn’t sign in good conscience. It was the state’s End-of-Life Options Act, which had been circulating among lawmakers in Dover for nearly a decade. Although the act was broadly popular—a poll found that more than 70 percent of Delaware residents supported the physician-assisted suicide proposal—until 2024 it had never gained significant support in the legislature. Then a last-minute vote in the senate passed the bill by one vote and pushed it to the governor’s desk. 

But Carney is a Catholic. And on the question of suicide, the Catholic Church is clear: Suicide, in any form, is not only an offense against God, but also an offense against civil society because it “unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations.” 

So Carney vetoed the bill. “I am fundamentally and morally opposed to state law enabling someone, even under tragic and painful circumstances, to take their own life,” he wrote to members of the general assembly, adding, in the words of the American Medical Association, that physician-assisted suicide is “fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer.”

The decision was made easier by the fact that Carney, a Democrat, was a lame-duck governor and risked no repercussions from his party. (It also says something about the quirks of Delaware politics: In November, Carney became the first sitting governor to be elected mayor of a city, Wilmington, his hometown, where he ran unopposed.) Still, backers of the bill, which proposed allowing doctors to prescribe life-ending drugs to mentally competent patients with less than six months to live, grumbled that the governor had chosen his own moral code over the rights of state residents. “Are you that uncaring and devoid of empathy?” asked the bill’s sponsor, Paul Baumbach, after Carney’s veto. “These people are dying. The last time I checked, we didn’t elect him as our priest.”

Delaware’s physician-assisted suicide bill was one of twenty such bills introduced in state legislatures last year, all of which failed. It was the one that came closest to passing. (A similar bill in Maryland failed by one vote to make it to the supportive Gov. Wes Moore’s desk.) The bill has already been reintroduced in the house, where it sailed through committee. If it passes both state legislative bodies, the new governor, Matt Meyer, has promised to sign it, in an explicit repudiation of Carney’s moral stand.

“Unlike Governor Carney, I would sign the bill that the legislature passed,” Meyer said during a debate last October. “There are many people out there, who I understand—there are serious religious concerns about the bill. I understand there are many people who would say ‘I would never do that.’ I believe they should have a right not to do it, just as people should have a right to exercise their right to die.”

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Meyer reiterated that promise shortly after his inauguration last month, signaling that assisted suicide in 2025 is a priority for him. At the same time, Catholic leaders in the state have taken up where Carney left off, repeating what they have stated every other time assisted suicide has received serious attention in the state: that the bill, if passed, would in dangerous ways “fundamentally change Delaware’s legal approach to medical ethics, medical practice, and health care decision-making.”

Delaware presents an interesting case study of a long-running issue in state politics. The debates over physician-assisted suicide are often obscured by euphemism and partisanship, but here, the two governors’ conflicting positions make its terms clear. On the one hand there is Carney’s position: that the first duty of a doctor is to heal his patients, which means that allowing physician behavior to in any way actively hasten sick people toward death cannot be supported by law. And on the other, there is the position of the bill’s supporters, formulated so baldly by Meyer: that the right to direct the course of one’s life naturally implies the right to dictate the terms of one’s death. 

These are the terms on which virtually every American assisted suicide turf war has been waged. And in Delaware at least, those representing Carney’s position, a position which until rather recently has been the default in this country, face a difficult battle.