When it first came into force on 1 April 2002, the Netherlands\u2019 euthanasia law permitted physicians to end a patient\u2019s life without criminal liability. This would be provided that the patient was either a newborn baby or over 12 years old, and was deemed to be unbearably suffering with no prospect of improvement.<\/p>\n
Just 23 short years later, the first child under the age of 12 has been euthanized<\/a> in the Netherlands, according to revelations from the nation\u2019s Health Minister, Sophie Hermans this week. The law was changed to allow for this two years ago, following suit from its neighbor, Belgium, which became<\/a> the first country to provide euthanasia for children of any age.<\/p>\n Everywhere that euthanasia or assisted suicide has been made legal, attempts to expand the eligibility of the law have rapidly been made. Many of them have been successful.<\/p>\n In Canada, euthanasia and assisted suicide were made legal<\/a> in 2016 for people whose death was deemed to be reasonably foreseeable. Just 10 years and 100,000<\/a> deaths later, the law is nothing like what it originally was. In 2021, only five years after the law came into force, the requirement that an individual\u2019s death was to be \u201creasonably foreseeable\u201d was repealed. Less than a year from now, in March 2027, it could become legal<\/a> for people to end their lives solely for reasons regarding their mental health.<\/p>\n Now, there are discussions in Canada for the law to be expanded to allow for the euthanasia of newborn babies. The Quebec College of Physicians claim<\/a> that the euthanasia of newborns with \u201cdeformations\u201d or \u201cmedical syndromes\u201d may constitute an \u201cappropriate treatment\u201d. The expansion of such laws is the logical endpoint of legislation that uses arbitrary eligibility criteria and malleable terminology to decide who qualifies to end their lives.<\/p>\n It is precisely this vague terminology that so many people who are concerned about the assisted suicide bill in England and Wales take issue with. The bill, which was brought back<\/a> to parliament in May after being previously not making it past the Lords, restricts eligibility to adults who are deemed to be terminally ill, with a prognosis of six months or less. Already, this law is more lax than those in other nations, as suffering itself is not a prerequisite; the physician\u2019s guess is the key defining criterion.<\/p>\n Speaking during the bill\u2019s Third Reading in the House of Commons, then-sponsor of the bill, Kim Leadbeater, said<\/a> that under the legislation, \u201conly terminally ill patients who are eligible under the strict criteria and want to access assisted dying can do so\u201d. Even if this were the case \u2014 which countless MPs, Peers, and experts elsewhere have explained is not \u2014 it would only be so until the inevitable campaign to expand the law occurred.<\/p>\n This is not a hypothetical slippery slope. Assisted suicide lobby group My Death, My Decision plainly states<\/a> on its website that those in the organization \u201cdo not believe that there is a strong moral case to limit this option solely to those with six months left to live\u201d, arguing that \u201clife expectancy in and of itself says nothing\u201d about the extent of an individual\u2019s suffering. Humanists UK, another prominent lobby group, responded<\/a> to the introduction of Leadbeater\u2019s bill by arguing that an assisted suicide law should also be for \u201cthose who are suffering intolerably from incurable conditions which may not be terminal\u201d.<\/p>\n Both critics and supporters of the reincarnated assisted suicide bill are sick to death of it; debate around it dragged on for 18 months before running out of time in the Lords, and it threatens to drag on again, too, with neither side seeming likely to concede any ground. It will have its second reading in the House of Commons, for the second time, on 11 September. MPs and the wider public should be aware that a vote for the bill is inevitably a vote to open the door to the further expansion of the law, as has been the case elsewhere, and as the lobby groups themselves desire. This tragedy in the making must be ended now, before it is too late.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When it first came into force on 1 April 2002, the Netherlands\u2019 euthanasia law permitted physicians to end…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17714,17826,17827,17682,6,17828],"class_list":["post-25771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-netherlands","tag-assisted-dying","tag-assisted-suicide","tag-canada-assisted-dying","tag-euthanasia","tag-netherlands","tag-youth-euthanasia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}