LONDON (BP)–The Dutch parliament’s Nov. 28 decision to legalize euthanasia will place more pressure on vulnerable groups such as the disabled and elderly, and it is another step closer to the practice of eugenics as promoted in 1930s Germany, Dutch pro-lifers say.
The 104-40 vote in favor of decriminalizing a practice that has been tolerated for 25 years makes the Netherlands the first country in the world to have legalized euthanasia.
Bert Dorenbos of the pro-life group Cry for Life said by telephone Nov. 29 that the move was “shocking, but confirmed in law what was already being done.”
“As the [Dutch] minister of health has now said, you can plan your death. If you have the beginning of Alzheimer’s, and do not want to go on with it, you can plan your death, and your doctor will help you to be killed,” Dorenbos told the Internet news site CNSNews.com.
The new legislation requires Senate approval, but this is considered a formality. Euthanasia and “assisted suicide” — when doctors provide, but do not administer the legal drug — have been widely practiced in the Netherlands, and up to 4,000 people die this way each year.
Though technically illegal, doctors have not been prosecuted as long as they met certain guidelines.
Dorenbos said the new law would have a profound effect on the old and sick. “The pressure on elderly people will be growing. If someone has Alzheimer’s, others will say: ‘Why don’t you euthanize yourself?'”
He challenged the notion put forward by supporters of euthanasia that people should have the right to choose their time and manner of death.
“There is no right to die. We will die anyway. What has happened now is that the right to die is one of the fundamental rights in our law. Doctors are excluded from the penal code if they practice euthanasia.
“Our question is, What will be the next group of professionals who will be excluded from the penal code? If you exclude one group, you’ve made the code no longer objective. It’s a very dangerous situation — the world should be warned.”
Dorenbos said Cry for Life would continue its campaign to alert people to the wrongs of euthanasia.
The organization would be distributing a new video on euthanasia in Holland, produced by the Christian Medical and Dental Association in the United States.
“It’s very touching to see sons and daughters and wives of people who are euthanized — very traumatic,” Dorenbos told CNSNews.com.
“We will distribute it here and will continue to relate [euthanasia] to the practice of 1930s in Germany, where the doctors and lawyers and politicians had the same line of thinking and ended up killing demented and handicapped people [through compulsory castration, sterilization and euthanasia laws].”
Already, he said, disabled people in the Netherlands were at risk, which was why disability organizations were so opposed to euthanasia.
“The Peter Singer ideas are actively promoted in Holland now,” Dorenbos said. Singer is an Australian bioethics professor who has written that parents should have the right to kill severely deformed babies. His appointment to Princeton last year sparked protests from pro-life and disabled groups.
Dorenbos said his organization was challenging Christians around the world to act and pray, saying they were “much too quiet about this issue.”
In the Netherlands, he added, liberal churches supported euthanasia, and even Bible-believing churches who were strongly opposed to abortion seemed disinterested in the issue.
The Vatican has decried the lawmakers’ decision, saying it regretted the fact Holland had become “the first country to adopt legislation that divides legislators and public opinion, a law that violates the dignity of human beings.”
A spokesman for the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands was quoted as saying the pressure would now be on ill people, who consider themselves a burden on their family, to give up.
The new Dutch law provides for guidelines which must be adhered to by doctors. Before choosing death, the patient must suffer from irremediable and unbearable pain, be aware of all other medical options and have sought a second professional opinion.
The patient must then make a voluntary, well-considered and lasting request to die. A legal and medical commission will assess each case.
Earlier this year the draft bill was amended to exclude a clause which would have allowed children as young as 12 to opt for euthanasia without the consent of their parents.
Although the pro-euthanasia lobby advocates the right of a person to die “with dignity,” and describes a peaceful bedside scene in which the patient quietly slips away while surrounded by loved ones, this is not always the reality.
A Dutch report published in the New England Journal of Medicine last February found that problems occurred at times, including difficulty inserting an intravenous line, vomiting, convulsions, a lengthy interval between the administration of the drug and death, failure to induce a coma, or a patient awakening out of the induced coma.
An editorial accompanying the study said the information “will come as a shock to the many members of the public … who have never considered that the procedures involved in physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia might sometimes add to the suffering they are meant to alleviate and might also preclude the tranquil death being sought.”
Voters in Oregon approved doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients in 1994, and the law took effect three years later.
Australia’s Northern Territory legalized medically assisted suicide for terminally ill patients in 1996 but repealed the law the following year.
In some other countries, such as Switzerland, doctors may provide legal drugs to terminally ill patients, who must then take them themselves.
A recent study by academics in Belgium, published in the Lancet medical journal, found that euthanasia — although illegal — was responsible for 10 percent of deaths there.
In a small number of cases, lethal drugs were even administered without the patients’ explicit consent, they found.
But the researchers used the findings to suggest that, were euthanasia to be made legal in Belgium, fewer cases of this type would occur, as in the Netherlands.
“Perhaps less attention is given to requirements of careful end-of-life practice in a society with a restrictive approach than in one with an open approach that tolerates and regulates euthanasia and [physician-assisted suicide],” they argued.
Britain’s Voluntary Euthanasia Society welcomed the Dutch move as showing the way for other countries.
“Dutch opinion polls show that a clear 90 percent of Dutch people fully support their government’s proposed legislation,” VES chairman Malcolm Hurwitt said. “And polls in the UK indicate that about 80 percent of people support the principle of voluntary euthanasia here too.
“We have a great deal in common with the Dutch, who are our close neighbors and share a great many of our democratic beliefs. We hope it will not be too long before the Mother of Parliaments in London feels able to follow suit,” Hurwitt said.
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Goodenough is the London bureau chief for CNSNews.com. Used by permission.
