Oregon Is, Indeed, A Slippery Pro-Death Slope

Here’s a piece that makes very clear what many of us have been saying for years: If you legalize assisted killing, it soon gets out of hand. Of course it's a slippery slope - don’t let anyone try to change your mind.

Oregon on the euthanasia slippery slope

Americans love conversation and public disputation about contested moral and ethical issues. Given the Australian Greens' continuing fascination with euthanasia, I decided to visit Oregon which has had a physician assisted suicide law in place since 1997.

In 2010, 96 Oregonians asked their doctors to prescribe a deadly barbiturate which they could ingest causing their own deaths; 65 of them went ahead and did so. This mode of dying accounts for just 0.2 per cent of deaths in Oregon. In the Netherlands, euthanasia accounts for ten times that percentage of deaths, and almost a third of them occur without the patient's explicit request. more