Pulse
Featured Image
 Shutterstock.com

January 11, 2016 (AlexSchadenberg) — A recent article by Stuart Chambers that was published on January 5 in the Ottawa Citizen claims that: 

It was a bitter pill to swallow for secular prohibitionists when large-scale abuses against vulnerable populations failed to materialize in those jurisdictions.

Chambers argues that there is only anecdotal abuse of euthanasia and assisted suicide and only religious arguments oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide ignoring the disability rights movement and the position of Not Dead Yet.

Chambers ignores the data from study that was published in the NEJM on March 19, 2015 on the experience with euthanasia in the Flanders region of Belgium. 

The study examined 3751 deaths in the first six months of 2013 in the Flanders region of Belgium and concluded that 1.7% of all deaths were hastened without request representing more than 1000 deaths yearly. The study also determined that euthanasia represented 4.6% of all deaths even though the official Belgian statistics indicate that euthanasia represented 2.4% of all deaths, meaning that almost half of all assisted deaths went unreported, which is a requirement of the Belgian law.

Chambers ignored the Belgian euthanasia data but he also ignored the data concerning the Washington State assisted suicide law.

The 2014 Washington State assisted suicide report states that 176 lethal prescriptions were received, 126 people died by assisted suicide, 17 deaths were from other causes, 6 people remained alive and there were 27 deaths from unknown causes. The data states that the ingestion status of the 27 deaths from unknown causes is simply unknown and the lethal prescription is unaccounted. What kind of oversight is that?

For the purpose of brevity, this article only examines a few key points. It should be a bitter pill to swallow for Chambers that my response did not require anecdotal evidence.

Reprinted with permission from Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.