You know, I’m starting to think that radical secularists lie. Like, a lot.
In attempting to pass physician assisted suicide in California, it was sometimes said that physician assisted suicide would actually reduce suicide rates. Well it turns out, if you can believe it, that legalizing physician assisted suicide actually increases suicide rates. I know, right?
The Daily Signal reports:
This debate heated up earlier this month as Gov. Jerry Brown, D-Calif., signed a law authorizing assisted suicide in California. At the same time, the October issue of the Southern Medical Journal included a study examining the correlation between legalizing physician-assisted suicide and the overall suicide rate. The study, “How Does Legalization of Physician-Assisted Suicide Affect Rates of Suicide?”, contradicts the notion that legalizing assisted suicide would reduce the total number of suicides by helping people cope with their declining condition.
The argument by physician-assisted suicide advocates is that if ill patients have confidence that they will have access to physician-assisted suicide in the future, then they will be less likely to commit suicide today, or ever.
The study, however, showed that suicides increase when physician-assisted suicide is legalized: “Controlling for various socioeconomic factors, unobservable state and year effects, and state-specific linear trends, we found that legalizing PAS [physician-assisted suicide] was associated with a 6.3 percent increase in total suicides.” Later, the researchers commented that “the introduction of [physician-assisted suicide] seemingly induces more self-inflicted deaths than it inhibits.”
Next we’ll find out that legalizing marijuana actually increases marijuana use or something.
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