Hardly a week goes by without another expert identifying a serious concern about MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill. This time the spotlight has been trained on the impact of legalising assisted suicide on other suicides. The danger is that if the law makes suicide acceptable for people with less than six months to live, it would be signalling that suicide, however it is achieved, is now acceptable.
The government’s suicide prevention adviser, Sir Louis Appleby, has said that legalising assisted suicide in England and Wales would hinder suicide prevention work. He told The Guardian: “I’m worried once you say some suicides are acceptable, some self-inflicted deaths are understandable and we actually provide the means to facilitate the self-inflicted death … it’s an enormous change with far-reaching implications.”
Suicide is an appalling tragedy. This is something governments recognise and take steps to address. England is in the middle of a five-year suicide prevention strategy. The Welsh Government has a strategy. Scotland has published “Creating Hope Together: suicide prevention action plan 2022 to 2025”. In March last year, the government gave £10 million worth of funding to charities working to prevent suicide.
Protecting vulnerable people
Appleby doesn’t consider himself opposed to assisted suicide. Nonetheless, he understands how most of us feel about suicide: “As society, we are signed up to the idea that we should do all we can to help [suicidal people] get through. It’s very rarely questioned. Society accepts that it has a role in protecting people who are vulnerable and at risk. We look after our friends when they’re in crisis. We sit up all night with them. We look out for strangers on a bridge.”
Significant increase
So is there any evidence that legalising assisted suicide impacts other suicides? Yes. Professor David Paton and his colleague Professor Sourafel Girma in their 2022 study found “evidence that legalisation of assisted suicide is associated with a significant increase in total suicides. The increase is observed most strongly for the over-64s and for women. There is weaker evidence that assisted suicide is also associated with some increase in unassisted (unregulated) suicides, most particularly in the 35–64 age group and for women.”
Professor David Albert Jones of the Anscombe Centre in Oxford looked at data from European countries that legalised euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS) and found that “EAS is followed by considerable increases in suicide (inclusive of assisted suicide and euthanasia)”.
No reduction in total suicides
Professor Jones also found that: “No reduction exists in non-assisted suicide relative to the most similar neighbouring non-EAS country.” Similarly, Professors Paton and Girma also reject the argument that people will opt for assisted suicide rather than committing suicide without the help of the medical profession and thereby reduce the number of suicides. They state: “We do not find any support either for the suggestion that legalising assisted suicide might reduce total suicides or that it will reduce unassisted suicides.”
And yet another study in 2022 concluded: “The findings of this review do not support the hypothesis that introducing EAS [euthanasia and assisted suicide] reduces rates of non-assisted suicide. The disproportionate impact on older women indicates unmet suicide prevention needs in this population.”
Women at risk
Women seem to be particularly at risk from assisted suicide. The campaign group Other Half has identified that: “Suicidality can be contagious and women seem vulnerable to seeking ‘suicide by the state’.”
In the Australian state of Victoria, the main plank of the propaganda campaign to legalise assisted suicide was that it would prevent the tragedy of 50 traumatic suicides among elderly people each year. However, says Dr Greg Pike in a paper commissioned by SPUC, “Instead of 50 fewer suicides a year among this vulnerable population, there have been about 50 more per year. Is it possible that something akin to the Werther effect (copycat suicides) is the cause? Promoting assisted suicide legitimises any form of suicide for this vulnerable group. Now, many more of the frail elderly die by suicide (in either form) than before the law changed.”
If we change the laws in Britain to allow assisted suicide, we risk sending a message to the whole population that suicide is an acceptable solution to a problem. We may end up not caring for our friends and ignoring the stranger standing on the bridge.
