Washington Ceases Publishing Legally Required Annual Assisted Suicide Reports

Another “strict guideline to prevent abuse” of assisted suicide has just been euthanized in Washington State, continuing an ongoing trend of loosening assisted suicide laws and practices.

The legalization law requires annual reports to be issued by the state to promote transparency. Well, from now on, opaqueness will be the order of the day. From the Medical Futility blog, by pro-assisted-suicide activist Thaddeus Mason Pope (whose blog is a reliable source of information on these issues):

Like almost all other aid-in-dying jurisdictions, the Washington State statute requires the “department of health shall generate and make available to the public an annual statistical report of information collected.” In response, the Washington DOH dutifully published 15 reports between 2009 and 2023.

But because of funding cuts, the DOH announced that the 2023 report was its last. There will be no more reports on how many patients are using MAID in Washington. No more demographic information about these patients.

Some states are slow in publishing their data. For example, we have yet to see a report from New Mexico even though the law was enacted in 2021. Other states have not published any data for over a year or more. But only Montana has never even promised to provide public data. Now Washington will similarly provide no public data.

Just remember: when activists tell you they want strict controls on assisted suicide to induce you to go along, they don’t mean it. Their goal is to effectuate wide-open euthanasia through incrementalism — a tactic that begins almost as soon as the laws go into effect.

But many people don’t seem to care much about that, perhaps preferring a comfortable pretense to grappling with the inevitable consequences that flow from such a radical change in law and morality.