Well, for those who believe that assisted suicide is the ultimate expression of individual choice and freedom, it is useful to look at the statistics coming out of the Netherlands where nearly 2% of all deaths are the result of doctor 'assisted' euthanasia. This should be a fairly disturbing statistic to anyone who is concerned about life, especially considering the Dutch track record with regards to 'involuntary' euthanasia.
The Remmelink Report provides the following statistics:
2,300 people died as the result of doctors killing them upon request (active, voluntary euthanasia).(7)
400 people died as a result of doctors providing them with the means to kill themselves (physician-assisted suicide).(8)
1,040 people (an average of 3 per day) died from involuntary euthanasia, meaning that doctors actively killed these patients without the patients' knowledge or consent.(9)
14% of these patients were fully competent. (10)
72% had never given any indication that they would want their lives terminated. (11)
In 8% of the cases, doctors performed involuntary euthanasia despite the fact that they believed alternative
options were still possible. (12)
In addition, 8,100 patients died as a result of doctors deliberately giving them overdoses of pain medication, not for the primary purpose of controlling pain, but to hasten the patient's death. (13) In 61% of these cases (4,941 patients), the intentional overdose was given without the patient's consent.(14)
According to the Remmelink Report, Dutch physicians deliberately and intentionally ended the lives of 11,840 people by lethal overdoses or injections--a figure which accounts for 9.1% of the annual overall death rate of 130,000 per year. The majority of all euthanasia deaths in Holland are involuntary deaths.
The Remmelink Report figures cited here do not include thousands of other cases, also reported in the study, in which life-sustaining treatment was withheld or withdrawn without the patient's consent and with the intention of causing the patient's death. (15) Nor do the figures include cases of involuntary euthanasia performed on disabled newborns, children with life-threatening conditions, or psychiatric patients. (16)
The most frequently cited reasons given for ending the lives of patients without their knowledge or consent were: "low quality of life," "no prospect for improvement," and "the family couldn't take it anymore."(17)
In 45% of cases involving hospitalized patients who were involuntarily euthanized, the patients' families had no knowledge that their loved ones' lives were deliberately terminated by doctors. (18)
These statistics should be chilling, and they do not include the statistics for infanticide and other forms of non-end-of-life euthanasia. The common justification for this behavior (aside from compassion) is the scarcity of medical resources. This has to do with the Dutch definition of 'necessity', which allows for a doctor to involuntarily terminate a patient for the 'greater good'.
In 1991, the Dutch Supreme Court expanded the definition of 'necessity' to include non-somatic, mental health-related issues of pain:
the necessity defence is not limited to cases where the patient is in the terminal phase of an illness of somatic (physical) origin.
The necessity defence can also apply where a patient's suffering is entirely of a non-somatic origin (ie is
mental suffering only, rather than suffering due to physical pain). A psychiatric patient's wish to die therefore
can be legally considered the result of a competent and voluntary judgement.(158)
Further, the suffering of a psychiatric patient can be legally considered 'lacking any prospect for
improvement' if the patient has refused a realistic therapeutic alternative.
The courts must approach cases where the necessity defence is said to be based on non-somatic suffering 'with
exceptional care'. Accordingly, the defence cannot be invoked in these cases unless the patient has been
examined by an independent colleague/medical expert.(159)
This creeping expansion of euthanasia should be read not as an aberration in an otherwise functional system, but should be understood as an endemic problem in the process of giving individual doctors (or even groups of doctors) the power of life and death.
Just something to think about.
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