Richard Egan is a researcher who has studied euthanasia and assisted suicide since 1987.
© Richard Egan 2025
Beginning with the first, short-lived experiment with a law permitting euthanasia, which was conducted in the Northern Territory from July 1996 to March 1997, there are thirty jurisdictions which have (or had) a scheme permitting either euthanasia or assisted suicide or both.
For other jurisdictions considering whether to legalize assisted suicide or euthanasia these jurisdictions can usefully be seen as a series of experiments in attempting to create the much vaunted “safe” regime for assisted suicide or euthanasia.
The data from each of these laboratory experiments in ending human lives is patchy. Many of the regimes, despite claims of their “safety”, seem to have been deliberately designed to minimize the collection and publication of data to make it impossible ever to know how often things go wrong.
Nonetheless scrutiny of all the data that is available from these experiments leads to the conclusion that
they are all – in various ways – fatally flawed.
To read the full document Click Here