Pro life groups have warned that evidence from overseas suggests the legalisation of assisted suicide would open the floodgates to ever increasing suicides and that supposed safeguards are often ignored.
Although attempts to legalise assisted suicide in Westminster and in Scotland both failed, campaigners have pledged to continue the fight. Indeed, since 2000, there have been at least 10 attempts to get some form of assisted suicide on the books, often supported or championed by Labour’s Lord Falconer.
In response to the never ending campaign, Right To Life UK said it hoped to the idea of assisted suicide “unthinkable”. In their latest intervention, the group pointed to recent figures from Western Australia, which has seen a 243 per cent increase in euthanasia cases in the last four years.
Dr Scott Blackwell, Chair of the Western Australian Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD) Board, said in the group’s annual report that activity across its services had been “more than 10 times higher than predicted at implementation”.
The report found that over a quarter of patients (26.7 per cent) may have been engaged in “doctor shopping” - making multiple “first requests” for assisted suicide in the hope of finding a doctor willing to say yes.
Perhaps more concerning was the finding that over a quarter of those who made their “final request” for assisted suicide, did so without going through the nine-day waiting period, which is intended as a safeguard for those who may change their mind.
The figures also revealed a 34 per cent increase in applications for assisted suicide and euthanasia from people who were not receiving palliative care. The vast majority of such cases said they had not received any palliative care for at least a year.
In over a thousand first assessments for people seeking assisted suicide, none were identified as being induced by coercion. This means that either there were no such cases or that the system is failing to detect them.
Alisdair Hungerford-Morgan, Chief Executive of Right To Life, said an urgent inquiry into VAD was required.
“Euthanasia deaths in Western Australia have risen by 243% in just four years, with 2.92% of deaths now caused by euthanasia or assisted suicide. This is the highest proportion for any state in Australia and one of the highest assisted death rates in the world at its fifth full reporting year, second only to where Canada was five years into the assisted suicide law operating there," he said.
“This will likely get much worse if the law is expanded and further safeguards are removed in Western Australia, as is being demanded by assisted death campaigners and astonishingly by the very Committee tasked with ensuring the law and its purported safeguards operate properly”.
Gordon Macdonald, chief executive of Care Not Killing, said figures from the Australian state of Queensland painted a picture of how assisted suicide could play out in Britain, were it legalised.
“VAD [voluntary assisted dying], which has only been legal since 1 January 2023, now accounts for ~3% of all deaths in the state … To put those figures in a more familiar context, Queensland’s population is less than one-twelfth that of the UK’s. Extrapolated to a population our size, the number of state-assisted deaths would have exceeded 13,000," he said.
