Just two years ago, in June of 2021, Spain became yet another country in the Western world to legalise assisted suicide, with nearly all of the votes that passed the law coming from left-wing parties while those on the Right, such as the entirety of the populist-conservative party VOX, were strongly against it.
A pro-assisted suicide group in Spain has now released a report on the first year and a half following the legalisation of euthanasia, revealing that from June 2021 to December 2022, a total of 370 people have been killed via medically assisted suicide.
The association Right to Die with Dignity (DMD), who presented the report, lamented the difficulties faced by those who wish to seek assisted suicide, noting that there was a lack of commitment to assisted suicide by private health providers, the newspaper El Mundo reports.
Doctor Fernando Marín, one of the authors of the report, also stated that some private insurers have not responded to requests from those seeking medically assisted deaths saying, “There have been people waiting for a solution for six months and they have not been told anything because of the disorganization of private health.”
In 2022, medically assisted dying made up 0.064% of all of the deaths in Spain, although the authors concede that there is a lot of disparity in the data by region and that the data at that level is not of the best quality.
So far, Spain remains among a minority of European countries that have enacted laws to legalise the practice of active medically assisted suicide, joining the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and most recently Portugal which voted to allow the practice in limited circumstances in May of this year.
The Netherlands was the first country in Europe to legalise actively assisted suicide in 2001, which came into force in 2002.
The number of assisted suicide deaths has increased in recent years, to the point where statistics revealed earlier this year noted that 5.1% of all of the deaths in the country were from assisted suicide, up from 4.5% in 2021.
People with cancer make up the most common requests for assisted suicide, but a growing number of people with dementia are also being killed, with 288 cases in 2022.
In 13 cases, doctors had allegedly not met the legal criteria for assisted suicide, which includes a patient in unbearable suffering who has little to no chance of recovery.
While the Netherlands is one of the most liberal countries in Europe in regard to assisted suicide, the country is nowhere near as liberal regarding the issue as Canada, which legalised the practice in 2016 and amended the Canadian Criminal Code in 2020.
Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAiD as it is commonly referred to in Canada, has seen the number of cases skyrocket in the last several years to the point where it has been claimed that MAiD deaths in the French-speaking province of Quebec made up around 7% of all deaths last year.
The Daily Mail newspaper claimed earlier this month that as many as 13,500 people have been killed via MAiD in 2022, a 35% rise in the numbers from 2021. The claimed number is over 13 times higher than the 1,018 MAiD deaths recorded when the practice was first legalised in 2016.
In Canada, many people are eligible for MAiD. The government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has sought to expand eligibility even further as people with simple mental illnesses will be eligible for MAiD as of March 14th, 2024, and other groups have called on the government to allow “mature minors” to access assisted suicide as well.
In some cases, people who are simply suffering from poverty have requested assisted suicide, while Canadian doctors are encouraged to talk about MAiD with their patients if they have serious illnesses or if they have disabilities, with some pro-MAiD groups arguing doctors have an obligation to do so.
Earlier this week, an Ontario mother of three, who happens to also be quadriplegic, went viral on the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok after noting that her application for MAiD took less time than her application for disability assistance.
“The fact that it takes six to eight months to receive disability support and only 91 days to receive medical assistance in dying based on the fact that I have a permanent disability and decreased quality of life but my quality of life is decreased based on the level of support that I receive,” Rose Finlay said.
“I have 12 days left on my medical assistance in dying application here in the province in Ontario. I’m a quadriplegic single mom raising 2 kids with disabilities,” she said in her viral video.
The Canadian public’s attitude to MAiD is largely positive, with around a third of Canadians stating they would be fine with expanding assisted suicide to the homeless and a fifth said they were fine with MAiD being offered to anyone for any reason at all.
