The number of people killed by assisted suicide in California has rocketed by over 60 per cent in just one year.
In 2022, 803 people killed themselves by taking lethal drugs prescribed by a doctor, up from 522 the previous year. The surge came after the law was changed to reduce the required duration between a person’s two requests for assisted suicide from 15 days to just 48 hours.
Between 2016 and 2022, more than 3,300 Californians who were deemed to have less than six months to live killed themselves under the state’s End of Life Option Act.
Deaths
Overall, 1,270 individuals received prescriptions for the lethal drugs last year, but the status of almost a quarter of those people is unknown.
This could mean that their death was not recorded, they are still in possession of the drugs, or they never collected them.
Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, warned: “This self-reporting system makes it impossible to know when a doctor does not send in a report or abuses the law”.
‘Normalised’
Earlier this month, the head of a Government quango in Quebec said residents are increasingly viewing euthanasia as a legitimate alternative to natural death.
Dr Michel Bureau, president of Quebec’s Commission on end-of-life care, believes so-called ‘safeguards’ could be in danger of being violated, as increasing numbers of people seek euthanasia for “all kinds of illnesses”.
Since the Canadian province legalised euthanasia in 2014, the number of those who have been killed by medics has rocketed from 63 in 2015-2016, to 3,663 in 2021-2022.
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