Assisted dying: what can the UK learn from places where it is legal?
by Professor Lady Ilora Finlay, Guardian:
What if parliament were to follow the advice of right-to-die campaigners and legalise assisted dying? As it happens, we have the published experiences of Oregon and the Netherlands to guide us in the UK.
In 1997 the US state of Oregon licensed doctors to supply lethal drugs to terminally-ill patients who met certain conditions – that they had less than six months to live, had mental capacity and were acting voluntarily.
Up to 2013 there was a steady overall upward trend in the numbers of such assisted suicide deaths. But from 2013 there has been a marked upturn. The two years 2014 and 2015 saw an 80% increase in deaths of this nature: there are now more than eight times the number than when the law came into force.
Oregon, with only 3.8 million inhabitants, has less than half the population of London. Oregon’s assisted death rate last year is the equivalent of over 2,000 physician-assisted deaths in England and Wales every year – and the numbers are still rising.
There are other concerns too. There is “doctor shopping”, whereby people whose doctors won’t participate in assisted dying (and two out of three won’t) seek lethal drugs from other doctors who are willing but have never met them before and know nothing about them beyond case notes. One such doctor issued no less than 27 prescriptions for lethal drugs in 2015 alone.
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