The number of people dying by a lethal injection at the hands of their doctors has also nearly doubled in the space of just 10 years, according to the Federal Commission for the Control and Evaluation of Euthanasia.
Statistics show that in 2023 there was a total of 3,423 euthanasia deaths, an increase of 15 per cent on the 2,966 euthanasia deaths in 2022. In 2013, the number of recorded euthanasia deaths was 1,807.
The 2022 deaths represented a 10 per cent increase on the euthanasia deaths of the previous year in line with an almost uninterrupted year-on-year increase since the practice was legalised in Belgium in 2002 for people suffering unbearably from terminal illness.
In almost a quarter of recorded cases, the reason given for euthanasia was poly-pathologies, rather than terminal illness, in which patients suffer from a range of complaints such as a loss of vision or hearing, arthritis and incontinence. In half of these cases, the patients were not dying from their illnesses.
In more than 75 per cent of cases, a combination of physical and psychological suffering were given as reasons for the euthanasia to proceed.
Scientific studies estimate, though, that somewhere between 25 per cent and to 35 per cent of all euthanasia deaths are undeclared.
The new figures show that a third of all euthanasia deaths involve people under the age of 70 years.
A total of 89 people were given lethal injections solely because of their psychiatric conditions or cognitive disorders such as dementia.
The figures demonstrate a broad expansion of euthanasia with a corresponding decline of palliative care. Since 2014, Belgium has also made euthanasia available to children.
The report on “assisted dying” by the UK parliamentary Health and Social Care committee last week failed to heed widespread evidence of the creeping expansion of euthanasia and the futility of safeguards from all over the world where euthanasia is being embraced by the State.
The report was severely criticised by the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, an institute serving the Catholic Church in Great Britain and Ireland, for claiming inaccurately that there was no evidence of a slippery slope in jurisdictions where assisted suicide and euthanasia had been legalised.
Professor David Albert Jones, director of the Anscombe centre, said: “It is disappointing that the committee was not more critical of those from countries that have legalised assisted suicide and who claim to see no evil and hear no evil.
“There is ample evidence of adverse effects in these countries: people having their lives ended without consent; increases in unassisted suicide; people being refused assisted living but offered ‘assisted dying’; people seeking death not because of physical suffering but because they feel a burden to others.”
Last year Catholic Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp voiced his support for euthanasia when he suggested that the killing of the sick elderly was as morally justifiable as killing an enemy on the battlefield in a just war.
In an interview with La Libre, a Belgian newspaper, Bishop Bonny said he rejected the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church that euthanasia was an intrinsic moral evil.
“This is too simple an answer that leaves no room for discernment,” he said. “Philosophy has taught me to never be satisfied with generic black and white answers. All questions deserve answers adapted to a situation: a moral judgment must always be pronounced according to the concrete situation, the culture, the circumstances, the context.”
He said: “We will always oppose the wish of some to end a life too prematurely, but we must recognise that a request for euthanasia from a young man of 40 is not equivalent to that of a person of 90 who faces an incurable illness.
“We must learn to better define concepts and better distinguish situations.”
He continued: “It is good to remember that we cannot kill, and I am against all murders. But what is killing, what is murder? What do you say to someone who kills an enemy in the name of self-defence?
“What do you say to someone who has been affected by an incurable illness for years and who has decided to request euthanasia after talking to their family, their doctor, their loved ones?”
The bishop added: “It is not up to a bishop to judge the law. I rather consider its application on the ground, and it is clear that we all fear that this application is too liberal and that there are too many slippages – that requests are accepted too quickly without an alternative solution being sought.
“But the response to this shift cannot be a red card issued against all euthanasia.”
Euthanasia is denounced in the Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1992 as a sin as grave as murder.
Three years later, Pope St John Paul II confirmed in the papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae that the practice “is a grave violation of the law of God since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person”.
Pope Francis has also repeatedly condemned euthanasia and confirmed in Samaritanus Bonus (2020) that the practice “is an intrinsically evil act, in every situation or circumstance”.
However, the Pope has not as yet held Bishop Bonny to account for his rejection of such teaching.