The International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide is an invaluable educational resource in the fight against euthanasia. The Task Force publishes the highly informative Update, an essential tool to keeping up to date on the fast-moving euthanasia issue.
The current edition is now out. One of the most interesting articles exposes how Oregon has recently begun to severely truncate the information it releases in its annual (increasingly useless) annual report. Here is an excerpt:
Adding insult to the injury of questionable data in previous assisted-suicide reports, the Oregon Department of Human Services (ODHS) issued its latest “Ninth Annual Report on Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act” in an abridged format so short that it prompted one Oregon doctors’ group to call it “amazingly brief and incomplete.”...Data missing in this report included the number of lethal prescriptions written by individual doctors, a statistic included in some previous reports. Also missing were explanations as to why statistic totals for previous years were changed in the 2006 tables (see chart)—making the questionable data even more suspect. Furthermore, doctors were present for only 15 of the 46 PAS deaths, so the exact circumstances of most deaths were not directly observed by reporting doctors. [“Ninth Annual Report on Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.”]The Update is not about polemics, but rather, the dissemination of accurate information (citations included). This is a good approach: The more people learn about euthanasia the less they tend to support it. Check it out.
