No Slippery Slope

When arguments heat up over physician-assisted suicide, folks who oppose the practice often raise the specter of coerced euthanasia. The slippery slope argument goes that once the able minded are able to enlist the help of others to end their lives, folks within the orbit of the not-so-able minded will be able to pervert the process to end the lives of the inconvenient. If true, it would be a powerful argument to proceed slowly, although it doesn't seem to me to require a complete ban on the practice.

But, as a new study reported in USA Today shows, those fears may be unfounded. The study, in the Journal of Medical Ethics reviewed practices in Oregon and the Netherlands, where physician assisted suicide is legal, as they impacted "vulnerable groups":

Researchers focused on such groups as the elderly, women, the uninsured in Oregon (the Netherlands has universal insurance), racial and ethnic minorities, the poor, the less educated, people with psychiatric illnesses, minors, the chronically ill and people with AIDS.

The conclusion:

The study finds that people with AIDS were the only group with heightened use of physician-assisted suicide. This has been found in previous studies, especially in areas with large gay communities such as in San Francisco, says bioethicist Margaret Battin, a professor at the University of Utah and author of the study.

Overall, people who died with a doctor's help were more likely to be members of groups 'enjoying comparative social, economic, educational, professional, and other privileges,' the study says.

Opponents of physician-assisted suicide, apparently unable to tear down the research, attack the messenger:

But groups opposed to physician-assisted suicide such as Not Dead Yet based in Illinois, Californians Against Assisted Suicide and the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition based in Canada have criticized Battin's study because she did not disclose that she is on the board of the Death with Dignity National Center, a non-profit organization leading the defense of Oregon's assisted-suicide law.

Battin says the study is objective research in a peer-reviewed journal, and she does not receive money from the center.

The study was sponsored by the University of Utah, Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Oregon Health & Science University in Portland and VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam.

One would think it might be good news to those groups that their major concern with the practice has not materialized.