A federal court has barred the state of Illinois from enforcing its assisted-suicide law against the Archdiocese of Chicago, the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm and the Little Sisters of the Poor while the lawsuit filed in early September is resolved. The order, issued on September 11 by Judge Franklin Valderrama of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, came one day before the rule was to take effect and barely a week after the complaint was filed.
The preliminary injunction protects the Catholic institutions from the challenged provisions while the proceedings continue, according to Becket reported, the legal organization representing the plaintiffs. They argue that the rule violates their religious freedom by compelling objectors to provide information about assisted suicide, facilitate certain steps of the procedure and refer patients to those who do participate in it.
Cardinal Blase Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, has stated that the protection must become permanent and not remain a preliminary injunction tied to the litigation calendar.
Illinois has not opposed this temporary protection. The state had previously agreed that the law would not be enforced against other Catholic plaintiffs in a separate proceeding while that litigation runs its course. That prior acquiescence weakens the state’s procedural position and partly explains the speed with which the new order was issued. It does not, however, amount to a waiver of the state’s right to defend the constitutionality of the rule on the merits.
Read also: Cupich and two religious communities take Illinois to court over its assisted-suicide law
The case follows a pattern already seen in New York, where the assisted-suicide law took effect on August 5 with the challenging Catholic institutions protected by a preliminary injunction granted days earlier by another federal court, InfoVaticana reported at the time.
In both states the strategy is similar: the litigation is not aimed at legalization in the abstract, but at the specific obligations the rule imposes on those who refuse to participate. The ground is institutional objection, not patient rights.
That shift has consequences. By litigating the scope of obligations rather than legalization itself, Catholic institutions obtain swift and reasonably solid protections, but they leave out of these lawsuits the substantive debate on assisted suicide.
Read also: Assisted-suicide law takes effect in New York while the Church continues its legal battle
The Little Sisters of the Poor, who run nursing homes, are familiar with this path. They have spent fifteen years litigating in the United States to avoid funding contraceptives in their employees’ health insurance, a legal battle that continues before the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Illinois legalized assisted suicide in late 2025, when Governor JB Pritzker signed the measure on December 12 despite public opposition from the state’s bishops, who warned of risks to the most vulnerable patients. It is precisely the application of that law to faith-based health-care institutions that the plaintiffs are now challenging in court.
Judge Valderrama’s order does not resolve the litigation: it freezes enforcement of the challenged provisions against the plaintiffs while the proceedings continue. The court will later decide whether that protection becomes permanent, as Cupich requests, or whether it lapses once the merits are examined. Until then, the Archdiocese of Chicago and the institutions of the two religious congregations covered by the order remain protected from the obligations of the law that are incompatible with their faith.