The Assisted Dying Bill
have overall been a positive reform. In fact, there are even a select few like Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada that allow you to make an application for the program regardless of how long you have left to live.
But how do we assess whether physician-assisted suicide has been a net success?
The most commonly used debate against assisted dying is the argument of a slippery slope. The argument, as proposed by philosopher Daniel Callahan, explains that when voluntary euthanasia is first legalized, strict restrictions of patient consent and approval from multiple doctors will be enforced in order for the process to go through (Bioethics on Demand, 2020). However, over time these safeguards will inevitably weaken; there will be borderline cases where the patient may not meet the criteria for assisted dying, but will be prescribed the lethal medication, nonetheless. And eventually there will come a point where euthanasia becomes involuntary and people are dying for conditions that could be easily treated instead (Bioethics on Demand, 2020). While this argument is generally used against physician assisted suicide on the whole, it becomes even more relevant when discussing extending assisted dying to non-terminal cases. Once you include severe but non-terminal physical and mental diseases, how do we stop the practice from progressing to those who have less serious illnesses? There emerges a grave danger that assisted dying will move away from being a process that helps those who are suffering severely towards what is essentially a legalization of murder. So, we need to use data from other countries where physician-assisted suicide is legalized for the non- terminally ill to see whether there has been a slippery slope. As mentioned earlier, there are only four western countries where active euthanasia is legalized beyond any scope of terminal illness – Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada and Spain (World Population Review, 2025). The best way of measuring the slippery slope argument would be by looking at the percentage of deaths annually from assisted dying programmes, and whether the number has increased substantially each year. A large rise in the number of people being killed is an indication that more and more people are being accepted as part of the programme, and that potentially the restrictions for who qualifies are becoming looser. However, Spain only legalized assisted dying in 2021, meaning there is currently very minimal data available on euthanasia, and therefore it is best to examine the other 3 countries instead (BBC, 2021). On the other hand, it would be beneficial to have a separate country to compare our findings to. Otherwise, how will we know at what percentage does assisted dying go from being a beneficial practice to a worryingly high number of people passing? To compare, we can use California, where from 2016 onwards they have allowed assisted dying for those whose deaths are reasonably foreseeable (UCLA, n.d), and whose end-of-life model has been widely praised for being adequately thorough and providing guidance to patients in need. From 2019 to 2021, physician-assisted deaths made up roughly 0.15% of all the deaths within California across the three-year period, with 3344 Californians exercising their end-of- life option during this timeframe (Pullman, 2023, p. 65). Looking at Belgium in comparison, a finding from 2002 to 2007 showed that the number of euthanasia cases did in fact increase each year – in the country’s annual reports, euthanasia was the reason for 0.23% of all deaths in 2002 and 0.49% of deaths in 2007 (Smets et al, 2010, pp 187-192). It is to be expected that euthanasia rates in countries where the practice is restricted to the terminally-ill will be lower – after all,
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