The Netherlands and Belgium legalized euthanasia a number of years ago. Originally, the idea was to let terminally ill patients put themselves out of their misery. But once the basic taboo against physicians killing their patients was surmounted, euthanasia in those countries has expanded to the mentally ill, to the depressed, to children, and to those who are just “tired of living.” Belgium would not dream of carrying out capital punishment, but it approved of euthanasia for a convicted murderer who asked for it, though he later backed out.
Charles Lane gives the details about how euthanasia keeps expanding to include more and more people, including those who cannot give meaningful consent, such as children and the mentally handicapped. Read his whole article for the details. I excerpt his conclusion after the jump.
From Charles Lane, Europe’s sinister expansion of euthanasia – The Washington Post:
What’s noteworthy about euthanasia in Europe, though, has been its tendency to expand, once the taboo against physician-aided death was breached in favor of more malleable concepts such as “patient autonomy.”
“What is presented at first as a right is going to become a kind of obligation,” Belgian law professor Étienne Montero has warned.
In 2013, euthanasia accounted for one of every 28 deaths in the Netherlands, three times the rate of 2002. In the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, one of every 22 deaths was due to euthanasia in 2013, a 142 percent increase since 2007. Belgium has legalized euthanasia for children under 12, though only for terminal physical illness; no child has yet been put to death.
The United States, like Europe, is aging, with all that implies for the spread of Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders. If pressure rises for more doctor-assisted death, Lerner and Caplan insist, “physicians must remain primarily healers.”
“Part of the problem with the slippery slope,” they write, “is that you never know when you are on it.”
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