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The case for legalising assisted suicide and euthanasia simplistically assumes that once legalised such deaths will be both rapid and peaceful. However, this is not the case. As a 2019 article in the journal Anaesthesia found:

Complications related to assisted dying methods were found to include difficulty in swallowing the prescribed dose (≤9%), a relatively high incidence of vomiting (≤10%), prolongation of death (by as much as seven days in ≤4%), and failure to induce coma, where patients re-awoke and even sat up (≤1.3%).This raises a concern that some deaths may be inhumane.

In Belgium deaths by legal euthanasia have increased more than tenfold (1003%) from 235 in 2003 – the first full year of legalisation – to 2,357 in 2018.

Assisted suicides increased by a further 6.3% from 2017 to 2018 and now account for 0.47% of all deaths of adults in Oregon.

The Australian Care Alliance warmly congratulates Emeritus Professor John Murtagh on his well-deserved honour as an Officer of the Order of Australia.

His endorsement, as set out below, of the Alliance has been a great encouragement to us in our work of opposing assisted suicide law.

John Murtagh AO
MBBS, Bsc, Bed, FRACGP, DipOBST RCOG|Emeritus Professor, General Practice, Monash University

“It is pleasing to note that ACA is emphasising the importance of appropriate access to palliative care.”

Read his full letter of endorsement here.

Writing in Le Temps Swiss aged care physician Dr Jacques Aubert reflects on the reasons for the increasing requests for assisted suicide from Swiss seniors. 

He explores five societal injunctions which "with the power of a Jungian collective unconscious, become problematic in the fourth age", that is for people approaching their eighties and older, as they seem to validate "the nonsense of the pursuit of a life that no longer meets these criteria".

Reporting on a meeting of the Netherlands Association for a Voluntary End of Life (NVVE), Guardian journalist  correctly identifies the "strong whiff of [white] upper-middle class entitlement" that pervades pro-euthanasia movements everywhere.

The Netherlands and Belgian euthanasia movements are increasingly impatient of any reluctance by any doctor to accede to a demand for euthanasia whether it is from a mentally ill young person or the family members of a person with dementia.