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Guarantee end-of-life care, agency, disability support, clinician conscience, and anti-coercion safeguards while leaving medical-aid-in-dying authorization to democratic conscience.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 11, 2026
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What is failing, what we would change, and the conclusion we are willing to defend.
A dying adult can be abandoned in two directions. Government can ignore a capable patient's settled end-of-life wishes. A health system can call death a choice while pain care, home support, disability services, or protection from family and financial pressure are missing. The Innovation Party draws hard lines around both failures while recognizing that its members can reach different moral conclusions about intentional medical assistance in dying.
The party therefore does not impose a national party-line requirement to legalize or prohibit medical aid in dying. Legislators, candidates, members, and states may decide that a capable terminal adult should have a tightly regulated option. They may also decide that medicine and the state must never intentionally facilitate death. Either conclusion remains consistent with the platform only when it preserves the shared floor below and states its moral cost honestly. Choice at the end of life must never become pressure to end a life.
The Innovation Party proposes:
Guarantee end-of-life agency and care everywhere. Protect advance care planning, refusal or withdrawal of treatment, proportionate pain relief, palliative sedation for refractory symptoms, hospice, accessible communication, mental-health care, disability and home support, caregiver respite, medical privacy, and spiritual support.
Protect conscience in every direction. No individual clinician should be forced to prescribe, dispense, administer, attend, or participate in intentional life-ending care. No clinician should be punished merely for lawful participation under a permitting law. Institutions must provide accurate information, ordinary palliative and emergency care, records, and safe transfer without requiring an objector to perform the contested act.
Prohibit abandonment disguised as choice. An insurer, facility, or public program may not introduce aid in dying while denying or delaying requested life-sustaining, palliative, disability, home, or mental-health care. Coverage, staffing, and quality metrics may not reward steering toward death.
Require strict safeguards wherever a state permits it. Limit eligibility to a capable adult with an incurable disease reasonably expected to cause death within six months; require independent prognosis and capacity review, repeated private requests, coercion screening, a short reflection period, a verified care-and-support choice set, patient control of the final act, complaints, audits, and public de-identified outcomes. Exclude minors, surrogate requests, clinician-administered euthanasia, psychiatric-only eligibility, and disability, age, dependence, poverty, dementia, or chronic illness alone.
Keep the authorization vote a protected conscience question. National party discipline should enforce the shared rights and anti-coercion floor, not require one answer on whether a state authorizes the final act. Any government that authorizes it must accept the burden of independent oversight. Any government that prohibits it must preserve treatment refusal, aggressive symptom relief, neutral discussion, lawful travel, and support for the dying.
Oregon's 2025 report recorded 400 deaths after ingestion, 24 people who outlived the six-month prognosis, and only two referrals for psychological or psychiatric evaluation. Oregon also states that its health authority does not investigate whether eligibility was correctly determined. Those facts do not settle the moral question. They demonstrate why any permitting law needs stronger evidence and independent correction.
This position is pluralist without being empty. The party is unequivocal about care, nonabandonment, disability equality, clinician conscience, patient privacy, and institutional accountability. It is honest that those principles constrain the authorization question but do not produce one uncontested moral verdict about intentional assistance in death.
Turn frustration into useful pressure.
If this position misses evidence or a lived consequence, challenge it. If it holds up, help test it locally and connect it to the issues around it.