The numbers of people who commit suicide surge in countries which legalise euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, new research has revealed.
The rates of “self-initiated” suicides are uniformly higher in places where euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS) are now legal than in places where such practices remain prohibited, according to research by the Oxford-based Anscombe Bioethics Centre.
The institute, which serves the Catholic Church in the UK and the Irish Republic, also found that women were disproportionately more likely to kill themselves in countries where EAS is permitted.
Professor David Jones, the director of the centre, said the evidence revealed the EAS was threat to suicide prevention.
He said: “I am really concerned that the legalisation of euthanasia or assisted suicide can have a negative impact on a people who are struggling to find their lives valuable and meaningful.
“There have been four peer review studies on EAS and suicide rates in 2022 and they all point in the same direction.
“I would advise anyone to look at the evidence for themselves. It is very troubling”.
He added: “The UK law against encouraging and assisting suicide plays a key role in suicide prevention. We need to preserve this law. Lives are at stake.”
Anscombe based its conclusions on evidence from studies in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States.
All the studies showed that physician-assisted deaths were accompanied by associated increases in the rates of self-inflicted suicides.
The study, called “Suicide Prevention: Does Legalizing Assisted Suicide Make Things Better Or Worse?” found both significant and incremental increases in the numbers of people seeking to die by lethal injection or by ingesting a lethal cocktail and an unexpected pattern of high and rising “self-initiated deaths”.
No study examined by the centre showed a reduction in non-assisted suicides.
Two of the papers considered by Anscombe were published only this year. They include one in the British Journal of Psychiatry which found “quite strong evidence that total suicides increase following implementation of assisted suicide laws and somewhat weaker evidence that part of the overall increase is driven by a net rise in unassisted suicides”.
Another, published in February, in The Journal of Ethics in Mental Health, revealed that not one European country which has legalized doctor-assisted death has seen a subsequent reduction in its rates of violent suicides.
Instead, “Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide and Suicide Rates in Europe” found that the introduction of EAS “is followed by considerable increases in suicide (inclusive of assisted suicide) and in intentional self-initiated death”, with women most “placed at risk of avoidable premature death”.
The paper compared self-inflicted suicide rates in European nations which permit euthanasia and assisted suicide and found them to be consistently higher than those of neighbouring countries which did not permit such practices.
Euthanasia has been legalized in much of the Anglophone world over the last decade, and is now practiced widely in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with the UK and Ireland under pressure from to change their laws to permit the practice or to allow assisted suicide.
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