The euthanasia bill returns to the Lords today. One number that rather underlines my opposition:

In Oregon, where assistance but not direct action to end a life is
allowed, only one in 700 of the people who died in the state in 2003
availed themselves of the option. In Holland, however, where voluntary
euthanasia was made legal in 2002 (though it had been practised for the
previous 30 years), one death in 40 was attributed to a termination.
There is evidence, too, that 1,000 deaths take place in Holland every
year as a result of action by doctors for which no specific request has
been given.

That’s a thousand people killed who did not ask for it. Presumably the doctors thought they were doing "the best thing" but it does rather show the slippery slope does it not? As was pointed out in a comment here last week, elderly patients in Dutch hospitals, when the evening medication rounds are made up, are known to say "No, not the pills, please, not the pills".

Is this what we really want? The elderly and infirm subject to the fear that the Doctor will kill them as it’s "the best thing to do"?

At least with Shipman we called it what it was, murder.

Update: Jackie Ashley rather manages to miss the point (well, yes, I know):

Lord Joffe’s bill was
referred to another Lords select committee, which reported in April
this year. Three members of the committee that sat 11 years ago,
Baronesses Jay, Warnock and Flather, now support Lord Joffe’s bill.
Perhaps the most significant piece of evidence that has changed their
minds is the experience of other countries that have introduced similar
legislation and that the committee visited.

The
big worry has always been that legalising assisted dying would somehow
put pressure on terminally ill people to go quickly, perhaps because of
the effect on their families; that it would oblige people to have
themselves killed – what the churches call a "moral watershed" for
western society. But according to the Remmelink report, commissioned by
the Dutch government after assisted suicide was legalised there in
2002, there was no evidence whatever of a "slippery slope" towards
non-voluntary euthanasia, and no evidence of pressure on vulnerable
people. The system in the Netherlands is now supported by 85% of the
Dutch population and the vast bulk of the medical profession there.

It was in fact Warnock who said that the elderly might in fact have a duty to die so as to conserve the estate and time of their children. And 1,000 people killed without their specific permission does look like a slope to me.