UK assisted suicide bill relied on Australian pro-euthanasia witnesses.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Anscombe Bioethics Centre (UK) published a research document concerning the emphasis on pro-euthanasia witnesses from Australia who testified in favour of assisted suicide in England and Scotland.

The document titled: Wrong Side of the World: The Misplaced Reliance on Australia in the UK Debate on 'Assisted Dying' focuses on how UK governments relied on Australian witnesses in the assisted dying debate.

David A Jones

Anscombe challenged the reliance on Australian witnesses by stating:

• The fact that the witnesses were all supporters of and most also involved in delivery of ‘voluntary assisted dying’ (VAD) gave the Committees a very one-sided view of the limited evidence;
• There is in fact very little evidence of the impact of these laws in Australia since Victoria has only five years of data and most other Australian jurisdictions have only one or two years;
• Other Australian jurisdictions have diverged from the law in Victoria, so data from Victoria is not a reliable guide to what is happening in those other jurisdictions; 
• VAD in Australia is very different from what is proposed in the Bills in Scotland and in England and Wales – practice in most Australian states is predominantly euthanasia;
• Many of the safeguards enacted in the VAD law in Victoria have been abandoned by other States – increased access has been given priority over safety;
• While Australian witnesses stressed that, in Victoria, ‘there have been no changes to the Act at all’, and claimed that the Government in Victoria ‘will not be reopening the law’, the Minister of Health in Victoria has now announced plans to ‘rewrite’ the law.
  

Anscombe explains who that the Australian witnesses universally supported legalizing assisted suicide. No Australian witnesses who oppose assisted suicide were invited to the UK.

Ancombe pointed out that:

Remarkably, the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee did not hear oral evidence from the United States. Similarly, the Public Bill Committee did not hear oral evidence from Canada, and neither Committee heard from witnesses from the Netherlands, Belgium, or Switzerland.

They then point out that: Alex Greenwich MP gave evidence on the implementation of VAD legislation in New South Wales, he was speaking on the basis of less than one full year of data.

Anscombe points out that Canada was more relevant than Australia. They state:

However, the law in Canada has since been amended to take it closer to the law in Belgium, and further changes are scheduled. It already overtly includes death for people whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable, and it is scheduled in March 2027 to expand this further, from chronic physical conditions to mental health conditions. Quebec has already overtaken Belgium in legislating for advance decisions to end the lives of people with dementia who are not able to provide contemporaneous consent. The rest of Canada is on the same path.

From the Canadian point of view, I noticed how UK governments were originally interested in Canada's experience with euthanasia. When stories related to the negative effect of Canada's euthanasia law were published invitations to speak in the UK dried up for me and for other Canadians.

When the Leadbeater assisted suicide bill was introduced it became clear that UK governments were intentionally ignoring the reality of Canada's euthanasia law