Not here, yet.
The Netherlands:
Full story on Daily Mail, where we learn that the ethics review panel said that the doctor had "crossed the line" but had not broken the law.
Illustration above at American Digest.
Meanwhile, Oregon has had legalized doctor killing since 1998. According to the state's public health department, this is the graph through the end of 2015.
And it seems that controls in Oregon are looser even than in The Netherlands, where physicians are required to report every time they kill a patient. In Oregon, there is no such requirement:
The DHS [state Dept. of Human Services - ed.] has to rely on the word of doctors who prescribe the lethal drugs. Referring to physicians’ reports, the reporting division admitted: “For that matter the entire account [received from a prescribing doctor] could have been a cock-and bull story. We assume, however, that physicians were their usual careful and accurate selves.”(Italics original.) Believe me, if doctors do not have to tell the authorities, they don't have to tell family members, either. Legally, there is nothing that stops an attending physician from offing your husband, wife, mother, or father during morning rounds, and then you just get a phone call.
The Death with Dignity law contains no penalties for doctors who do not report prescribing lethal doses for the purpose of suicide.
The 21st century is not turning out like I hoped it would.
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