According to a report from the California Department of Public Health, about 900 people in California are expected to die from assisted suicide in 2023. release this month.
Of the 1,281 people who received prescriptions for assisted suicide in the state last year, 884 obtained a mix of opioids and sedatives from health care providers and administered the lethal drugs themselves.
“In 2023, based on 290,511 deaths among California residents, 884 deaths will occur as a result of euthanasia drug ingestion, a rate of 30.4 deaths per 10,000 people, or 0.30 percent,” the report states.
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) has recorded 4,287 deaths by assisted suicide in the state. According to the report, California’s End of Life Options Act went into effect on June 9, 2016. law To give permission An adult with a terminal illness who has less than six months to live wishes to receive assisted suicide.
The 2023 figures mark a continued increase in assisted suicide deaths in the state for the second consecutive year. CDPH reported 497 assisted suicide deaths in 2020 and 523 in 2021, before seeing a spike in assisted suicide deaths in 2022 to 890.
Compassion and Choices, a pro-assisted suicide group, Belong The increase in assisted suicide deaths from 2021 to 2022 is due to the passage of amendments to the state’s assisted suicide law, which reduced the legally required waiting period between two verbal requests for “euthanasia” medication from 15 days to 48 hours.
In 2023, a total of 1,281 people received a prescription for assisted suicide medication, and 884 people completed the prescription process and ended their own lives. CDPH reported receiving documentation from 1,272 people who started the process by making two verbal requests to their doctor, separated by at least 48 hours. Of the 1,272 people who started the process, 1,214 received a prescription, and of those, 943 waited less than 15 days between the two verbal requests, according to the report.
Of the 1,281 people prescribed assisted suicide drugs, 276 had “unknown ingestion status.” Of those, 174 have died but the ingestion status is unknown, and 102 have “both death and ingestion status undetermined,” according to the report.
More than 90 percent of the 884 people who died by assisted suicide last year were over 60, had health insurance and were receiving hospice or palliative care, the report found.
Of the 884, 85.4 percent were white, although whites make up 70 percent of the total population. about Thirty-five percent of the state’s population had received assisted suicide. About 77% had at least a college education, and 80.4% had notified their family of their decision to end their life through assisted suicide, according to the report.
The majority of people who died by assisted suicide last year (63.8%) had some form of cancer, 12.1% had cardiovascular disease and 8.8% had a neurological disorder.
Of those who died in the state’s assisted suicide program, 776 died at home and 439 had a doctor or trained medical professional present at the time of intake, the report said.
Breaking News:
We are appealing the landmark case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the danger to vulnerable people is what drives us to continue fighting to overturn California’s assisted suicide law.
We won’t give up! Click the link below to find out more.https://t.co/AG1y0UDwwa pic.twitter.com/Nc1QLReHaL
— End Assisted Suicide (@EndAsstSuicide) July 23, 2024
In April 2023, several organizations opposed to assisted suicide, including Not Dead Yet and the Institute for Patients’ Rights, submitted The lawsuit seeks to “stop the Defendant Government Agencies and Officials from operating a deadly system that, under the guise of ‘compassion’ and ‘dignity’ in dying, isolates terminally ill people from necessary mental health, medical and disability services and leads them to suicide,” the lawsuit states.
“Physician-assisted suicide is not only a revival of archaic eugenic ideas, it also violates federal disability rights laws and federal constitutional provisions that protect people with disabilities from discriminatory, exclusionary and life-threatening government laws and policies,” the lawsuit continues.
A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit this spring, but the group Appealed Last week, they filed a lawsuit in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
10 states and Washington, D.C. To give permission States that allow assisted suicide include California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. Oregon was the first state to allow assisted suicide. Country In 1997, Oregon passed an assisted suicide law called the Death with Dignity Act.
