Doctor-aided suicide: No slippery slope(2005 that it was concerned with the risk...),Health

Battin and her colleagues wanted to look at what actually has happened in two places where it is legal for doctors to help patients end their lives:

• Oregon is the only U.S. state where physician-assisted dying is legal. The Oregon Death with Dignity Act was passed by voters in 1994 and 1997, survived numerous challenges and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006. The law allows doctors to prescribe lethal medications to patients who have been diagnosed by two physicians as having a terminal illness and less than six months to live.

  In the first nine years after the law took effect, 456 patients received lethal prescriptions and 292 of those actually used the drugs to kill themselves. That is 0.15 percent of all deaths in Oregon during the same period.

• The Netherlands has a 2002 law that allows doctors to prescribe medication for suicide or perform voluntary active euthanasia, in which the physician rather than the patient administers life-ending medication. Dutch law does not require terminal illness, but you have to be facing intolerable suffering, Battin says. Physician-assisted suicide and voluntary active euthanasia have been openly tolerated in the Netherlands since the 1980s under guidelines from the courts and medical groups.

  Of 136,000 deaths annually in the Netherlands, about 1.7 percent are by voluntary active euthanasia, 0.1 percent by physician-assisted suicide and 0.4 percent are extralegal because they involve patients with no current explicit request to die, but who either made one before bec
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