Euthanasia and the slippery slope
[1] Lawyer Eugene Volokh argued in his article The Mechanism of the Slippery Slope that judicial logic could eventually lead to a gradual break in the legal restrictions for euthanasia,[2] while medical oncologist and palliative care specialist Jan Bernheim believes the law can provide safeguards against slippery-slope effects, saying that the grievances of euthanasia opponents are unfounded.
Within the euthanasia debate, van der Burg identifies one of Richard Sherlock's objections to Duff and Campbell as fitting this model.
In responding to Duff and Campbell's stance, Sherlock argued that the premises which they employed in order to justify their position would be just as effective, if not more so, in justifying the non-treatment of older children: "In short, if there is any justification at all for what Duff and Campbell propose for newborns then there is better justification for a similar policy with respect to children at any age.
[13] More generally, it has been argued that in employing the slippery slope there can be an "implicit concession", as it starts from the assumption that the initial practice is acceptable – even though it will lead to unacceptable outcomes in the future.
[14] Nevertheless, van der Burg argues that this is not a useful concession, as the outcomes are intended to make it clear that the initial practice was not justifiable after all.
[17] Leo Alexander, in examining the events of the Holocaust during the Nuremberg Trials, stated that the origins of the Nazi programs could be traced back to "small beginnings", and presented a slippery slope argument.
[18] Others have argued that Action T4 is not an example of the empirical slippery slope,[8] as euthanasia was still a criminal act in Germany during that time, and there is "no record of the Nazi doctors either killing or assisting in the suicide of a patient who was suffering intolerably from a fatal illness".
[25] Anesthesiologist William Lanier says that the "ongoing evolution of euthanasia law in the Netherlands" is evidence that a slippery slope is "playing out in real time".
[27] Countering this view, professor of internal medicine Margaret Battin finds that there is a lack of evidence to support slippery slope arguments.
[28] Additionally, it is argued that the public nature of the Groningen Protocol decisions, and their evaluation by a prosecutor, prevent a "slippery slope" from occurring.
[24] Raanan Gillon, from the Imperial College School of Medicine, University of London commented in 1999 that "what is shown by the empirical findings is that restrictions on euthanasia that legal controls in the Netherlands were supposed to have implemented are being extensively ignored and from that point of view it is surely justifiable to conclude, as Jochemsen and Keown do conclude, that the practice of euthanasia in the Netherlands is in poor control".
[32] An October 2007 study, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, found that "rates of assisted dying in Oregon and in the Netherlands showed no evidence of heightened risk for the elderly, women, the uninsured (inapplicable in the Netherlands, where all are insured), people with low educational status, the poor, the physically disabled or chronically ill, minors, people with psychiatric illnesses including depression, or racial or ethnic minorities, compared with background populations.
According to research done by the Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam), University Medical Center Utrecht and Statistics Netherlands, and published in The Lancet, this is not more than before the introduction of the "Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide (Review Procedures) Act" in 2002.
