The Assisted Dying Bill
fewer people are eligible to be prescribed lethal medication, so a slight increase in percentage of deaths in Belgium compared to California is not necessarily worrying. Furthermore, it was found that 93.4% of patients who had received the practice during this timeframe were terminally ill, and that a vast majority (87.6%) were suffering from some form of cancer at the time of their deaths. So, while the percentage of people using the assisted dying program in Belgium did gradually increase in the 2000’s, the data shows that the majority of people who qualified for the practice were suffering severely and had the right to apply for PAD. However, the aforementioned study was completed in 2008 – 17 years ago. Looking at the most recent data report available from 2023, where the Belgian Federal Commission for the Control and Evaluation of Euthanasia released their annual report, it was found that physician-assisted suicide was responsible for 3.1% of all deaths in Belgium in 2023 and 3423 deaths in total (WRFDTS, 2024). This marks a 15% increase alone in the number of deaths from 2022, and in over 20% of the reported cases the doctor did not feel that the patient’s death was foreseeable in the short-term. There have also been numerous controversial cases reported in Belgium where patients received PAS despite arguably not fitting the requirements to do so. One example is Marc and Eddy, 45-year-old deaf and near-blind twins, who were both administered a physician-assisted death upon request despite neither suffering extreme physical pain nor fitting the terminally-ill threshold (The Christian Institute, 2013). Their deaths could be seen as a worrying first step towards euthanasia being accepted for those with disabilities, as argued by the co- ordinator of the European Institute of Bioethics, Carine Brochier, who raised the question ‘If all the people who have a handicap ask for euthanasia, are we going to kill them?’ (Wells, 2013). And Marc and Eddy’s case was not the only one in Belgium to make headlines. In 2020, three doctors went on trial over their role in the assisted death of Tine, a 38-year-old woman who had been diagnosed with autism two months previously. In the trial, Tine’s family argued that Tine only wanted to end her life because of a failed relationship, and that she was unlawfully poisoned (BBC, 2020). Although the doctors were eventually acquitted on the grounds that there was reasonable doubt, the legitimacy of Tine’s death still remains unclear, and her passing further emphasizes the danger of an assisted dying slippery slope. Therefore, through specific case studies and comparing both the data of today to that of 20 years ago, we can see that not only has the overall number of people dying to euthanasia increased, but also that the severity of illnesses of those who receive the euthanasia has decreased – confirming the slippery slope theory’s biggest fears. And sadly, Belgium is not an outlier. If anything, safeguarding issues around euthanasia have been best enforced in Belgium out of the three aforementioned countries. In the Netherlands, a highly controversial Groningen protocol has been developed and legalized in the late 2000s, which allowed for neo-natal euthanasia for infants pending consent from their parents (Vizcarrondo, 2014). Most worryingly, 40% of deaths via the protocol from 2005-2013 were performed due to ‘quality of life’ reasons, meaning that the infants were not projected to die as a result of their conditions and yet were killed nonetheless (Verhagen, 2013, pp 293-295). It is clear that, in the Netherlands, physician assisted suicide is no longer for those who are willing and suffering severely but has evolved to the point where euthanasia can be performed involuntarily on infants.
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