Mr. Andrew Copson:

In Oregon, the law has been unchanged for almost the entire time it has been in place. In Canada, from the beginning, the law applied to non-terminally ill people as well as terminally ill people. I think Switzerland has been the same since it began there. Laws do, of course, change, but they change as a result of democratically determined medical decisions that are based on the same sort of evidential bases that the committee is taking now. Not all change in human life or even politics is slippery slope change. The committee is debating change even now. I certainly was not saying that nothing ever changes but that the negative social consequences Professor Binchy spoke of, as if they were rampant and prevalent in all jurisdictions where assisted dying of any sort has been introduced, have no evidential basis. Switzerland has definitely been essentially the same. Those are the three examples.