Public attitudes toward assisted dying in Latvia

Assisted dying (euthanasia and physician assisted suicide (PAS)) has been an important topic of controversy in Latvia. However, so far there have not been any study of public attitudes on this issue. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to fill this gap. The paper presents the data gathered via stratified randomized sampling of Latvian adult population (N=1012, age 18 - 75). The survey was conducted by the public opinion research center SKDS from 09.10.2020 till 20.10.2020. Related-Samples Friedman's Two-Way Analysis of Variance by Ranks with Pairwise Comparisons shows statistically significant differences (p<0.05) between distributions of different attitudes. All statistical analyses are performed with IBM SPSS Statistics 26. Our data shows that public attitudes to different practices of assisted dying varies. In general, majority of respondents (59%) agree, that it might be the case, that person’s condition might get so bad, that death is preferable to life (20.8% disagree, 19.4% are neutral). Further, 56.5% of respondents agree that euthanasia is acceptable if patient’s condition is lethal (25% disagree, 18.5% are neutral). However, if patient’s condition is not lethal, then only 26.4% of respondents agree that euthanasia is acceptable. If patient’s condition is lethal, but the patient is a teen (aged from 12 to18), then 30.3% of respondents agree that euthanasia is acceptable, 45% of respondents disagree and 24.4% are neutral. Under the same conditions, if the patient is an infant, then 36.9% of respondents agree that euthanasia is acceptable, 37.6% of respondents disagree and 25.5% are neutral. Somewhat surprisingly only 38.4% of respondents agree, that PAS is acceptable if patient’s condition is lethal. 37.1% of respondents disagree and 24.6% are neutral. Our data shows that majority of respondents think that euthanasia is acceptable provided that a patient is an adult in lethal condition.