Branka van der Linden

What’s the big deal?

In her email, Ms van der Linden wrote provocatively against the Netherlands’ voluntary assisted dying (VAD) law, citing a recently-published medical journal study of Dutch VAD cases that involved people with intellectual disabilities or autism spectrum disorder (or both). The study is a legitimate examination of cases published by the Dutch Euthanasia Commissions, and contains numerous observations and some qualifications.

The first whopper

Mr van der Linden cherry-picks a single item from the study — that a majority of qualifying cases examined reported feeling socially isolated and lonely — and presses that into strong emotional words about “not caring” for people.

She failed to identify any other important aspect of either the study, or Dutch law, including:

• The article reported that two thirds (67%) of the cases had profound somatic (physical) conditions as well. Comorbidities are very common in Dutch VAD cases.
• The Dutch law requires:
  • The request to be well-considered
  • The patient’s suffering to be lasting and unbearable
  • The patient to be fully informed
  • The patient holding the conviction that there was no other reasonable solution, and
  • The attending doctor consulting a second doctor who also furnishes a written opinion about the qualification criteria.
     

So much for context and balance.

And she goes on.

The second whopper

Ms van der Linden then categorically and confidently states that:

“Like every other country that has legalised euthanasia, the debate in the Netherlands was initially about euthanasia for those with terminal illnesses. That has now shifted to approving requests for euthanasia for people with autism. This is the inevitable trajectory once a jurisdiction approves euthanasia laws.”

So much hyperbole. Let’s examine the facts:

1. Netherlands: The Dutch VAD law was legislated in 2001 and came into effect early 2002. It allowed non-terminal cases (including psychological) to qualify right from the outset.
2. Netherlands: Prior to the legislation, there was a period, from the 1980s, where VAD was approved by regulation (not legislation). Was that for terminal-only cases? Nope. Right from the outset, Dutch law permitted non-terminal cases.
    

So, Ms van der Linden’s claims about the Netherlands are foundationally false.

Now, on to the “inevitable trajectory” claim.

3. Belgium: Changed from terminal-only to non-terminal? Nope. (Non-terminal from the outset.)
4. Luxembourg: Changed from terminal-only to non-terminal? Nope. (Non-terminal from the outset.)
5. Switzerland: Changed? Nope. (There have been no statutory qualification criteria since 1942.)
6. USA states: Any of the lawful USA states, including Oregon where VAD law has been in effect since 1997, changed from terminal-only to non-terminal? Nope.
7. Australia: Any state changed from terminal-only to non-terminal? Nope.
    

Ms van der Linden’s claim is contradicted by so much evidence.

8. Canada: There is one notable jurisdiction where qualification criteria have changed, and that’s Canada. Changes have been many years in the making, involving nation-wide conversation and debate, steered by its legislature and most senior court. Many points have been thrashed out as representatives consider the issues and settle on what a majority of the nation's own citizenry (not Ms van der Linden) believes is appropriate.
    

Importantly, it’s worth noting that even with additions to qualification criteria set in law in Canada, they are still considerably more restrictive than in Switzerland — because Swiss legislation doesn’t stipulate any qualifying criteria. Yet Switzerland’s assisted dying rate is lower than Canada’s. It’s a cultural difference.

Changes to qualification criteria are very much the exception, not “inevitable” as Ms van der Linden wrongly states.

Two claims — both whoppers

It’s hard to imagine that Ms van der Linden, being so immersed in the VAD subject as she is, could be so unaware of the most fundamental facts. But maybe she is, despite the facts being easy to source. Such ignorance renders her an “unreliable witness”.

To my mind, repeatedly failing to establish the actual facts while confidently stating “counter-facts” that are not true — especially in order to influence others in support of one's personal ideological position — would be consistent with an impoverished sense of ethics.

Conclusion

I admire and respect Ms van der Linden’s passion for doggedly pursuing what she believes is right, and I’m thankful we live in a robust democracy that allows people to express and debate views consistent with their internal values.

What, I argue, isn’t worthy of admiration or respect is to repeatedly misinform one’s audience by failing to undertake the most basic checking to determine if what one is saying is fundamentally true, let alone balanced or contextually relevant.

 

Keywords: 

Fearmonger | Flapdoodle | Fudge | Fiction | Voluntary euthanasia (VE) | Netherlands | Branka van der Linden | Article review | Claim response | Legislation | Legislative reform | Lobbying: Opponents

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The reason the statistics are being discussed is because in 2017, Victoria's parliament legalised voluntary assisted dying (VAD) for the terminally ill. The law came into effect halfway through 2019, and 2020 was the first full year of its operation.

Australian Care Alliance gets the basics wrong

Here's the Australian Care Alliance's (ACA) splashy page trumpeting that Victoria's suicide rate has jumped 21.2% from 694 in 2017 to 842 in 2020.

Figure 1: ACA's splashy page trumpeting a 21.2% increase in Victorian suicides

That's... interesting. According to the Victorian coroner's official figures, there were indeed 694 suicides in Victoria in 2017. However, in 2020 the coroner's figure is actually 698, not 842 as claimed by the ACA. According to the ACA, Victoria's suicide count data looks like this (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The ACA polemically claims that Victoria's suicide count has increased 21.2%

So, how did the ACA reach a count of 842? Well, their argument is to shamefully and humiliatingly disrespect Victoria's terminally ill who died peacefully under its VAD law in 2020 — 144 of them according to the official 2020 reports of Victoria's Voluntary Assisted Dying Review Board — and add them to the coronial count of 698 suicides.

The ACA points out that VAD supporters have said that legalising VAD should decrease Victoria's general suicides by about 50 cases a year, but say the count's gone up substantially instead. See how they craftily deploy logical fallacy to fabricate a crisis?

Arguing that VAD law must reduce the suicide count by 50 cases a year (but seemingly didn't) and at the same time adding VAD cases to the suicide count to complain that it's gone up, requires at least three assumptions:

1. that all terminally ill violent suiciders now automatically qualify for and easily gain access to VAD; and
2. that nobody else with a terminal illness who would not have chosen violent suicide, should or would use the law; and
3. that no other factors make a significant difference to trends in general suicides.

 
All these assumptions are patently false.

Obviously, some people will not legally qualify for VAD; for example, amongst its restrictions it requires death to be expected with 6 months; 12 months for a small set of specific illnesses.

Obviously, some who would not have suicided but instead would suffer intolerably and against their wishes until death, will now choose to pursue VAD.

And obviously, well-known factors such as rates of mental illness, substance abuse, intimate relationship troubles, bullying, financial or legal difficulties, and other factors are major influencers of general suicide rates. But to the ACA, the only factor that supposedly has any effect is the one they are ideologically opposed to: VAD.

It's worrisome that this nonsense is sold to the public by ACA's supposed experts: “health professionals and lawyers”.

Cherry-picked overseas data, too

The ACA's ideological bias is further revealed by their website page about the “social contagion of suicide”. In it, they cite as authoritative, the 2015 Jones and Paton (both firm Catholics) article purporting to show 6.3% suicide contagion from VAD to the general population. I've comprehensively exposed that article as an ideologically-driven mathematical farce fuelled by no fewer than ten major scientific offenses. It's interesting that the ACAs methodology is just like Jones' and Patons': reporting VAD supporter statements that legalisation should decrease the general suicide rate, and then adding VAD deaths to conclude the opposite.

They also commit one of Jones' and Patons' other offences: selectively quoting data from other studies that might be seen to support their theory, but excluding critical alternative information from the same study that runs counter to the theory.

The ACA cites a Swiss study to breathlessly report that 6.5% of those who witnessed an assisted death in that country experienced sub-threshold PTSD, and 13% full PTSD. The ACA expressly states:

“Like any other suicide, assisted suicide can profoundly affect surviving family members and friends.” — The Australian Care Alliance

There you have it: the ACA draws a direct equivalence between peaceful VAD deaths in the face of terminal illness and with loved ones present, and lonely, violent deaths by general suicide.

The ACA cites no other relevant material from the Swiss article. That's revealing, because the article clearly reported that the PTSD rates were higher than in the general population. There's what the ACA left out: the PTSD rates were higher than for almost everyone else who hadn't just suffered the loss of a loved one.

To draw valid and meaningful interpretations, it is necessary to compare the bereavement challenges of VAD family versus families of general deaths, deaths in the face of extreme suffering without hastened death, and cases of violent suicide. As I've published before from peer-reviewed studies, bereavement symptoms of VAD family are at least as good as, and can be better than those where the deceased has suffered in extremis at the end of life, and certainly relative to violent suicides.

The ACA also doesn't mention that the Swiss study found a "prevalence of complicated grief ... comparable to that reported for the general Swiss population". It's not like the information was hard to find. It's right there in the Abstract on the front page of the article.

That the ACA cherry-picked a couple of Swiss data points while omitting key “unhelpful” information, and argued, by linking the selected cherries with the above quote, that said Swiss data established something it clearly did not (that VAD deaths supposedly cause similar family trauma as violent suicides), suggests an astonishing degree of ignorance.

The ACA's cherry-picking of data, while omitting key unhelpful information, suggests an astonishing degree of ignorance.

Enough of that.

Branka van der Linden cherry-picks, too

I've crossed pens (or is that keyboards?) with Ms van der Linden several times before in regard to misinformation. She misinforms on this matter, too.

Curiously, like the ACA and also without explanation, she cherry-picks just the 2017 and 2020 suicide counts from the Victorian coroner's report (Figure 3). You'd think this was the only data in the report, but no, it isn't.

Figure 3: Branca van der Linden's version of Victorian suicide counts by year

She uses these two figures to argue that said drop of 50 cases per year hasn't happened. This employs the same fallacies as the ACA: suggesting that two single data points strongly support a hypothesis, and assuming that the thing one is ideologically opposed to, VAD, is the only thing to alter the rate of general suicides over time.

Like the ACA, she also suggests adding the VAD figures to the coroner's general suicide data to say that in that case, suicides have increased significantly.

Both the Australian Care Alliance and Branca van der Linden cherry-pick just two data points from more full and robust longitudinal data to try and argue their case against VAD.

So what does the coroner's full data set look like?

The actual numbers

The Victorian coroner's 2021 report into suicides contains data for all years 2016 to 2020 inclusive. And it looks like this (Figure 4).

Figure 4: The complete set of data from the Victorian coroner's report on suicide counts per year

Now we're beginning to see a possible reason as to why the ACA and Ms van der Linden chose just two data points. Remember that VAD was legalised by the Victorian parliament in 2017. The law was not in effect for 2017, 2018, or the first half of 2019.

Well, the data clearly suggests an increasing suicide count trend up to 2018. The upward trend stops in 2019, when VAD was in operation for the second half of the year. And in 2020, the first full operational year of VAD, the upward trend has been interrupted by a downward result. Neither the ACL nor Ms van der Linden mention this.

Neither the Australian Care Alliance nor Branca van der Linden mention the fuller, longitudinal data that doesn't support, and indeed appears hostile to, their hypothesis.

But even the raw suicide count statistics are a bit misleading.

Interpreting suicide data correctly

Using raw counts to compare suicide statistics (e.g. year to year or place to place) is lazy and wrong. All other things being equal, if you had twice the population, you'd expect twice the suicide count. To make valid comparisons, you have to compare rates, not raw counts. This is relevant because populations obviously change over time, and Victoria between 2016 and 2020 was no exception.

I've retrieved the official Victorian population figures by year and computed the standard official suicide rate statistic: suicides per 100,000 population. The Victorian suicide rates look like this (Figure 5):

Figure 5: Victorian suicides per 100k population by year

The data shows a rising suicide rate from 2016 to 2018, a levelling off in 2019 in which VAD was operational for half the year, and a fall back to the 2016 rate in 2020, the first full operational year of VAD.

Computing from the rate drop between 2018 (11.4 with no VAD law) and 2020 (10.8, first full year of VAD law), the equivalent count of suicide decrease in 2020 was 38 persons. And that's without assuming the general suicide rate would have continued its rising trend.

The equivalent suicide decrease from 2018 to 2020 was 38 persons.

Getting all the numbers right

The ACA correctly cites then Minister for Health, Ms Jill Hennessy, as stating in 2017 that "Evidence from the coroner indicated that one terminally ill Victorian was taking their life each week." That would be 52 cases a year, which the ACA rounds out to 50 a year. The headline figure from the coroner's report actually calculates to 48. No biggie, just round numbers.

But the figure is quite wrong. You have to read the coroner's special 2017 report to the Victorian parliament regarding suicides in cases of illness, to calculate the correct numbers.

The coroner's report didn't just include suicide data for terminally ill people. It also included cases of advanced incurable but not terminal illness, and cases of severe suffering resulting from injuries. So the terminal illness data (to which the VAD law is relevant) is a fraction of the total. We can calculate from the Tables in the report that 23% of the cases were in respect of injuries, so that leaves 77% for terminal and other advanced illnesses.

Of the illnesses listed, the relevant one as a proxy measure for terminal illness is “cancer”, and that comprises 50% of the illness cases. So, 50% of 77% of 48 cases a year = 19 cases a year in respect of terminal illness.

So that's an actual likely decrease of 19 suicide cases a year, compared with an equivalent drop in the actual data of 38 persons in the first full year.

The actual annual count of general suicides in respect of terminal illness, as reported to the Victorian parliament by the state coroner in 2017, was 19 persons a year, and not 50 as widely stated.

Don't get carried away

It's imporant to note that citing this interesting numeric analysis as “proof” of the law's effectiveness in respect of reducing Victoria's suicide rate, would, at present, be an overconfident claim. While far more firmly based in proper forms of evidence than the vapid nonsense promoted by the ACA and Ms van der Linden, this is a correlation. Correlation does not equal causation: the ACA and Ms van der Linden should remember that. For example, 2020 was a very unusual, Covid-19-dominated annus horribilis, which may have affected suicide rates in unexpected ways.

While the coroner's fuller data set so far is consistent with reasoned expectations of suicide substitution, it is premature to conclude the data proves the principle. More years' data, and more detailed, causative analysis involving the control of confounding factors, is necessary before reaching greater certainty in the association.

But as I've published in detailed and extensive analyses based on robust official data, so far all the longitudinal data on suicide rates in jurisdictions where VAD is lawful is consistent with suicide substitution, not suicide contagion. Some VAD opponents just cherry-pick their way through tidbits to try and argue the opposite.

To date, all the robust, longitudinal data on suicides in jurisdictions where VAD is lawful is consistent with suicide substitution, not suicide contagion.

Conclusion

The Australian Care Alliance and Ms van der Linden disgracefully cherry-pick and misrepresent Victoria's recent suicide data in a manner consistent with their own theories, while proper and appropriate analysis of the full data available shows results inconsistent with their hypothesis, and currently consistent with the opposite.

To paraphrase Ms van der Linden's own statement: “It is unfortunate that the deaths of terminally ill Victorians were politicised so shamelessly by [anti-]euthanasia activists for their own ends.”

These continued cherry-picked data gaffes are an embarrassment to their promoters.

 

Keywords: 

Bull | Fudge | Fiction | Faith | Assisted dying (AD) | Australia | Victoria | Branka van der Linden | Religion | Catholic | Statistics | Rhetoric | Rhetoric: Suicide | Rhetoric: Suicide 'contagion'

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Van der Linden’s latest email to all WA MPs states:

 
Van der Linden’s method is to create an impression of calumny against VAD law reform. She uses a nice PR formula of three bullet points per communication. With repetition. It’s a method I expressly warned the WA Parliament to watch out for in my submission to its inquiry. The growing list of emails is now starting to look like ‘harassment’.

So let’s look at van der Linden’s claims — again. She’s talking about non-voluntary euthanasia (NVE) — again.

In her email to MPs, she complains that the WA majority report on end-of-life choices cited the study as evidence of the NVE rate reducing when VAD is legalised.

Well, the WA majority report formed that correct conclusion because that’s precisely what the cited study reported: drops in the NVE rates in both the Netherlands and Belgium after their euthanasia Acts came into effect in 2002.

While concerns ought to be expressed about the deliberate hastening of death without an explicit request from the patient with a view to improving knowledge and practices, it’s not caused by VAD laws as van der Linden desperately tries to imply.

Here are highly relevant things the cited study’s authors had to say, but van der Linden astonishingly ignores:

“The use of life-ending drugs without explicit patient request are not confined to countries where physician-assisted death is legal.”; and

“[NVE’s] occurrence has not risen since the legalisation of euthanasia in Belgium. On the contrary, the rate dropped from 3.2% in 1998 to 1.8% in 2007. In the Netherlands, the rate dropped slightly after legalization, from 0.7% to 0.4%” [The Belgian rate was 1.7% in a more recent replication of the research.]; and

The NVE cases found in the study “in reality resembles more intensified pain alleviation with a ‘double effect’, and death in many cases was not hastened.”

But let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good story. Van der Linden’s recent emails about VAD to MPs reveal astonishing ignorance and a willingness to overlook critical evidence contrary to her position, contained in the very source she cites.

The superficiality of her cherry-picking is kind of embarrassing: she holds an arts/law degree from Australian National University, so you’d expect more intelligent engagement.

It begs the question: who is Branka van der Linden? The “HOPE” website reveals little if anything.
 

Who is Branka van der Linden?

Branka Van der Linden is the current Director of anti-VAD website “HOPE (Preventing euthanasia and assisted suicide)”. HOPE is an initiative of the Australian Family Association, a Catholic lobby group established by Australia’s most famous lay Catholic, B. A. Santamaria.

HOPE’s founding Director and van der Linden’s predecessor, was Mr Paul Russell, the former Senior Officer for Family and Life at the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide.

It turns out that Branka van der Linden (née Seselja) is a sister of Catholic ACT Senator Zed Seselja who voted against David Leyonhjelm's recent Restoring Territory Rights (to legislate on VAD) Bill. But there’s more. Far more.

Branka, who attended Catholic St Clair’s College primary school and Padua Catholic High School, both in the ACT, is a “senior lawyer” at the Truth Justice and Healing Council, which provides services to the Australian Catholic Bishop’s Conference and Catholic Religious Australia in relation to the Catholic Church’s response to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

She’s advisory legal counsel for the lay Catholic St Vincent de Paul Society Canberra/Goulburn Territory Council. (And good on her for supporting this philanthropic work.)

She and her husband Shawn represent (or at least represented) the Australian Catholic Marriage and Family Council, and were representatives of the Catholic Archdiocese of Canberra & Goulburn on the National Family Pilgrimage to the (Catholic) World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia in 2015.

Husband Shawn has been described by the church as a “loyal Catholic servant” for nine years of service as the director of CatholicLIFE at the Catholic Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn.

And as if this weren’t clear enough, a sample of Branka’s Facebook Likes is equally informative:

It’s clear that Branka van der Linden, like her predecessor Paul Russell, is very deeply invested in Catholic tradition. I will be the first to say I firmly believe that is entirely her right.

Yet how curious it is that while repeatedly advancing (secular) misinformation about VAD, Branka van der Linden doesn’t mention her profound religious convictions. It's surprisingly similar to the approach evidenced by Catholic Professor of Ethics, Margaret Somerville; and Catholic (then) Victorian MP Daniel Mulino; and Catholic Editor of The Australian, Paul Kelly (who warmly quotes Mulino); and Catholic director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, Alex Schadenberg...

You get the idea: perhaps there's a pattern?

One possible source of pattern

What was it that the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, said at the 2011 Catholic Bioethics Conference in relation to opposing the legalisation of VAD?

"The most effective messengers may also vary: bishops, for instance, are not always the best public spokespeople for the Church on such matters."; and

"...the man or woman in the street ... may well be open to persuasion that permissive laws and practices cannot be effectively narrowed to such circumstances"; and

"We need to research and propose new messages also and carefully consider who should deliver them, where and how."

Nowhere in his address does Fisher propose actually testing whether his calamitous assumptions about VAD are true.

Gosh, another coincidence.

Epilogue

I want to be absolutely clear that I am not using a person’s religious conviction as a reason to dismiss their ideas. That’s called an ad hominem attack: an attack against the person rather than the substance of the argument (even assuming it has any substance to assess).

What I have done here and elsewhere, and I will continue to do, is to expose arguments that are false, misleading, illogical or otherwise unmeritorious on the basis of empirical evidence and reasoning.

It just turns out that organised misinformation against VAD law reform comes from deeply religious circles, and those religious circles often avoid mentioning their religiosity while spreading such nonsense under a ‘veneer of secularism’.

It’s in the public’s interest to understand where most organised misinformation against VAD comes from.

 

Keywords: 

Fearmonger | Flapdoodle | Faith | Australia | Anthony Fisher | Paul Kelly | Paul Russell | Alex Schadenberg | Margaret Somerville | Branka van der Linden | Religion | Catholic | Claim response | Legislative reform | Lobbying: Opponents | Statistics | Rhetoric: The 'vulnerable'

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Van der Linden's email reads:

 

 

The trouble is, all three claims by van der Linden are either directly false or egregiously misleading. Here are the actual facts:

FACT: Peer-reviewed scientific research shows that the non-voluntary euthanasia rate of both the Netherlands and Belgium has dropped significantly since their assisted dying Acts came into effect in 2002, consistent with more careful end-of-life decision making across the board.

Fiction 1: van der Linden improperly cherry-picked a single year’s statistic for each country (and, incoherently, a raw count for one but a percentage for the other), implying that lawful voluntary euthanasia increases non-voluntary euthanasia, when the opposite is true.

Fiction 2: van der Linden claimed Belgium’s non-voluntary euthanasia rate is 8%. It has never been anywhere near that figure: the most recent figure is 1.7% and it was 3.2% before Belgium’s euthanasia law.

FACT: Oregon’s health department actively matches death certificates with prescriptions issued for assisted dying. At any time some prescriptions have not been taken and the person may still be alive, and for the deceased, death certificates are still being processed. This naturally means that some prescription/death statuses will temporarily be ‘unknown’ to authorities, even though they will be later determined.

Fiction 3: van der Linden comically implies that this proper process is sinister.

It's curious how 'HOPE' likes to repeatedly demonstrate how HOPElessly uninformed it is about the actual facts and that its methods include cherry-picking data which it thinks supports its anti-assisted dying case, but which don't.

Western Australians deserve better than HOPE's silly propaganda campaign.

 

Keywords: 

Fearmonger | Flapdoodle | Fudge | Fiction | Faith | Belgium | Netherlands | Oregon | Branka van der Linden | Claim response | Legislative reform | Statistics | Rhetoric: Slippery slope | Rhetoric: The 'vulnerable'

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