Bulletin 14: False Claims of Slippery Slope

30th June 2008

In our last bulletin we outlined empirical, published research that shows the elderly, poor, uneducated, disabled, depressed, ethnic minorities and other supposedly “vulnerable” groups are in fact not vulnerable to legalised Physician Assisted Dying (PAD). We cited the statistics including Oregon (USA), on which the Victorian PAD Bill is modelled and for which 10 years of research data now exist.

You will have received a number of emotive rebuttals from those ideologically opposed to PAD, containing such hyperbole as “once the killing starts, it cannot be stopped!” Christine Campbell and others erroneously imply that PAD laws in overseas jurisdictions have resulted in increased non-voluntary euthanasia deaths for the supposed “vulnerable”, when the clear and unambiguous evidence is that they do not.^{1, 2}

In fact, in a document released by Christine Campbell in which she refers to a research paper and implies that non-voluntary euthanasia increases (and for which there is no evidence of an increase in the cited paper), the paper’s authors themselves conclude that the legalisation of PAD “has not resulted in increased rates of non-voluntary euthanasia." If this is the conclusion of the paper’s own authors, one wonders how Ms Campbell and others reach exactly the opposite conclusion.

Careful ongoing studies clearly show that “vulnerable” groups are in fact not vulnerable, except in some people’s imagination.

As Dr Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has said, “For [slipperyslope] hypotheses to justify restrictive laws, they need empirical support. In one’s imagination, anything can lead to anything else: allowing people to skip church can lead to indolence; letting women drive can lead to sexual licentiousness. In a free society, one cannot empower the government to outlaw any behaviour that offends someone just because the offendee can pull a hypothetical future injury out of the air.”

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¹ Battin et al, Journal of Medical Ethics, 2007, 33: 591-597.
² Bilsen et al, Social Science and Medicine, 2007, 65: 803.