The Netherlands became the world’s first country to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2002.
Since that time, the country has since witnessed a rapid increase in related deaths, with 20 now occurring daily, according to a recent report by the Regional Euthanasia Commission.
The report said 6,672 euthanasia deaths had been registered in 2015, compared to just 150 from assisted suicide, while 431 patients had been killed without explicit consent.
Euthanasia had originally been permitted only “at the explicit request of a patient in the terminal stage of an incurable somatic disease,” but had been steadily extended and was now accepted “before the terminal stage of life.”
The Dutch Bishops’ Conference warned from the beginning against violating the intrinsic dignity of human life through euthanasia or assisted suicide, because it is never ever allowable to violate intrinsic values. Doing so puts oneself the slippery slope of devaluing human life itself.
Dutch Bishops have insisted that an acceptance of euthanasia will always be accompanied by a temptation to end life when there are “less serious forms of suffering.”
In a January 2017 petition, 200 other Dutch doctors warned that legal protections were “slowly breaking down,” with many dementia and psychiatric patients being killed “without actual oral consent.” They accused the official Euthanasia Commission of concealing that “incapacitated people were surreptitiously killed,” and said “executions” were now occurring.
Ending life without consent had been made possible by the 2004 Groningen Protocol, which allows handicapped newborns with conditions such as spina bifida to be killed because of “their perceived future suffering, or that of their parents.”
A new assisted suicide bill, introduced in 2016, would allow healthy people suffering nonmedical conditions such as “loneliness, bereavement, limited mobility and decline from old age” to be helped to die by a nonprofessional “assistant-in-suicide.”
The Dutch Bishops have said: “Our answer to suffering should not be to offer euthanasia or assisted suicide, but adequate, professional and loving palliative care - of which, from a Christian perspective, pastoral care is an indispensable part. When people suffer unbearably and without prospect from loneliness, a frequent problem in today’s present hyper-individualist culture, we should try to change that culture instead of offering suicide to healthy people.”
Perhaps, what is even more unsettling about this story is the fact that euthanasia and assisted suicide are also legal in neighboring Belgium and Luxembourg and are deemed “nonpunishable” in Switzerland.
Polls suggest most Europeans favor euthanasia laws with safeguards.
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