Australian Care Alliance
Fatally Flawed Experiments in Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide
Beginning with the first, short-lived experiment with a law permitting euthanasia, which was conducted in the Northern Territory from July 1996 to March 1997, there are thirty jurisdictions which have (or had) a scheme permitting either euthanasia or assisted suicide or both.
For other jurisdictions considering whether to legalise assisted suicide or euthanasia these jurisdictions can usefully be seen as a series of experiments in attempting to create the much vaunted "safe" regime for assisted suicide or euthanasia.
The data from each of these laboratory experiments in ending human lives is patchy. Many of the regimes, despite claims of their "safety", seem to have been deliberately designed to minimise the collection and publication of data to make it impossible ever to know how often things go wrong. Nonetheless scrutiny of all the data that is available from these experiments leads to the conclusion that they are all – in various ways – fatally flawed.
Wrongful Deaths from Euthanasia and Assistance to Suicide
A careful examination of the evidence from those jurisdictions that have laws permitting either assisted suicide or euthanasia shows that at least twelve categories of people would be at risk of wrongful deaths.
Some proponents of legalising assisted suicide or euthanasia admit that it is the case that wrongful deaths will occur.
Henry Marsh, a noted British neurosurgeon and champion of assisted suicide, famously said, "Even if a few grannies are bullied into committing suicide, isn't that a price worth paying so that all these other people can die with dignity?"
This is the question that anyone considering this issue needs to ask.
The proper tests for a law permitting assisted suicide or euthanasia are the ones that are usually applied to any proposal to reintroduce capital punishment:
"Can we craft a law that will ensure there will not be even one wrongful death?"
"Can we ensure that any deaths under this law are humane - that is both rapid and peaceful?"
Both simple logic and the available evidence show that neither of these outcomes are achievable.