The annual report on euthanasia and assisted suicide in New South Wales reveals a disturbing 53 per cent increase in deaths over the past 12 months, Monica Doumit writes. Source: The Catholic Weekly.
The first annual report, published in November 2024, covered the first seven months of the euthanasia regime’s operation (November 28, 2023, to June 30, 2024) and recorded 398 deaths over that period. This amounted to an average of 13 deaths each week.
This report, the second annual report available, is the first to cover a full year of deaths in NSW and the results are staggering. One thousand and twenty-eight people died during the 2024-2025 financial year, or 20 deaths each week.
This represents an increase of more than 50 per cent in a single year, and an indication of how quickly a culture of death can take hold.
On top of this, another 471 people were approved for death, but are yet to take the lethal substance. This brings the potential death toll to closer to 30 deaths each week.
Apart from the increase in deaths, there were also a number of other items that were worthy of attention and deeper investigation.
Once again, more than two-thirds of euthanasia and assisted suicide deaths occurred in regional NSW, pointing once again to a lack of health care services in the regions.
Presumably aware of the criticisms this statistic drew during the last reporting period, the NSW Voluntary Assisted Dying Board attempted to draw attention away from this by redefining “regional NSW” in a way that reversed the numbers.
The NSW VAD Board reported that 58.5 per cent of deaths occurred in major cities, 34.5 per cent in “inner regional” parts of the state and 7 per cent in “outer regional” areas. A small footnote lists that the definition was sourced from the Australian Statistical Geography Standard.
However, the NSW Voluntary Assisted Dying Act provides a definition of “regional resident” and when this is used, the regional deaths amount to 67.5 per cent of all deaths, rather than the 41.5 per cent asserted at the front of the report.
This statistic is mentioned later in the report, along with a note from the board that attempts to explain it by saying the demographics were such that older people lived in the regions and so the regions should expect a higher death toll.
But the board’s explanation lacks in a few areas. First, the median age of those who accessed lethal drugs was 75 years, meaning that just as many people under the age of 75 were euthanised as those who were over 75.
FULL STORY
NSW euthanasia skyrockets (By Monica Doumit, The Catholic Weekly)
