We Warned What Would Happen. . .

More Than a Quarter of Deaths in Holland are "Induced"

John Burger
Aleteia

Fifteen years after the Netherlands decriminalized euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, more than 25 percent of all deaths in the nation are induced, rather than by illness or other natural causes.

That figure is based on statistics from 2017 and includes almost 6,600 cases of euthanasia; 1,900 suicides and some 32,000 people killed through a practice called palliative sedation, according to an article in the Guardian,  https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/18/death-on-demand-has-euthanasia-gone-too-far-netherlands-assisted-dying

In the article, journalist Christopher de Bellaigue traces the history of euthanasia in the Netherlands from when it was introduced for extreme cases (“unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement”) to the point where some are advocating for a legal pill that practically anyone can take in case they are tired of living.

“The process of bringing in euthanasia legislation began with a desire to deal with the most heartbreaking cases—really terrible forms of death,” said Theo Boer, who teaches ethics at the Theological University of Kampen. “But there have been important changes in the way the law is applied. We have put in motion something that we have now discovered has more consequences than we ever imagined.”  Boer is a former member of one of the five regional boards that were set up to review every act of euthanasia and hand cases over to prosecutors if irregularities are detected, de Bellaigue explained.

“One of the reasons why euthanasia became more common after 2007 is that the range of conditions considered eligible expanded, while the definition of ‘unbearable suffering’ that is central to the law was also loosened,” wrote de Bellaigue.

Will Doctors Be Charged With Murder? We Hope So.

 ‘Appalling’ Euthanasia of Dementia Patient

Dutch Probe

AP
Breitbart London


In a rare series of moves, Dutch authorities are investigating whether doctors may have committed crimes in five euthanasia cases, including the deaths of two women with advanced Alzheimer’s disease.  In one of the Alzheimer’s cases, which prosecutors began probing in September, a physician drugged the patient’s coffee without her knowledge and then had the woman physically restrained while delivering the fatal injection. The ongoing criminal investigation is the first since the Netherlands made it legal for doctors to kill patients at their request in 2002.

Dutch prosecutors announced they were examining four other cases last month, including the death of another Alzheimer’s patient who “lacked the capacity to express her own will,” according to a statement from the prosecutor’s office. A spokesperson said that specific criminal charges, if any, would be determined only after the investigations are finished. Several legal experts said that if doctors were found to have killed patients without their explicit request, they could potentially be charged with murder.

The investigations highlight the difficulties doctors face in handling euthanasia requests for those who later develop dementia. Mental decline can eventually make patients unable to understand the significance of their earlier demand to be killed, and as their brain changes, so can their personality and desires.

“If you made a living will when you were competent and asked for euthanasia, do we attach more weight to a decision you made when you were competent, or to your present situation where you’re no longer yourself and are no longer asking to die?” said Johan Legemaate, a professor of health law at the University of Amsterdam.

The Netherlands is one of five countries that allow doctors to kill patients at their request, and one of two, along with Belgium, that grant the procedure for people with mental illness. For those with late-stage dementia, euthanasia is still possible if the person made a written demand specifying the conditions under which they want to be killed and if other criteria are met, namely if the doctor agrees the patient is suffering unbearably with no prospect of improvement.

Whether Dutch authorities prosecute the doctors in the two Alzheimer’s cases being investigated will likely set a course for how the increasing numbers of people with dementia who seek euthanasia will be handled.

Holland's Integration Into the Void

Even the Pagans Are Objecting

Dutch euthanasia getting so out of hand that even assisted-death docs want to hit the brakes

Doug Mainwaring
LifeSiteNews

July 5, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — An advertisement taken out in a major newspaper in the Netherlands by more than 200 Dutch doctors begins, “[Assisted suicide] for someone who cannot confirm he wants to die? No, we will not do that. Our moral reluctance to end the life of a defenseless man is too great. "

The doctors, many of whom currently serve as assisted-suicide providers, are objecting to the unchecked growth of euthanasia in their country, where people who have reduced mental capacity due to dementia are being euthanised.

Current law allows doctors to euthanize without verbal consent if a written declaration of will has been provided in advance. In addition, a doctor has to also first determine that the patient is undergoing unbearable suffering. But with reduced mental capacity, patients are often unable to confirm that their former request to be euthanized — executed perhaps years earlier — is still valid.

Darkness of the Soul

Dutch Champion Legal Murder

Thomas Williams
Breitbart London

A Dutch physician who had family members restrain a struggling woman so she could administer a lethal injection has been cleared of wrongdoing by a review board.

Without consulting the patient, the doctor put a sleep-inducing drug into the woman’s coffee in order to give her the injection, but then the woman woke up and reportedly “fought desperately” to free herself. At this point, family members were summoned to hold the woman down so that the procedure could be completed.

The woman, who was in her 80s and suffered from dementia, had signed an advance directive to be killed “at the right time” though she had not ratified the request recently. According to case documents, she occasionally exhibited “fear and anger” and several times had been found wandering around the nursing home where she was living.

Medical records revealed that the patient had said “I don’t want to die” several times in the days leading up to her death, yet the doctor chose not to speak with her about her earlier request to receive euthanasia.

Dutch Multi-Culturalism

No Centre: Just a Utopian Vacuum

We have read recently Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).  Holland has styled itself as the most tolerant of all nations--a kind of oasis of sanity in a crazy world.  Now, however, its smugness has been severely dented.  It has been, as the saying goes, "cruisin' for a bruisin' ".

Buruma writes:

Heinrich Heine did not mean it as a compliment when he said that he would head for Holland when the end of the world was in sight, since everything in that country happened fifty years later.  Like most quips of this sort, it was unfair, yet not totally untrue, especially in the nineteenth century.  By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the Netherlands has pretty much caught up with the world, and since then things often happened earlier than elsewhere: tolerance of recreational drugs and pornography; acceptance of gay rights, multiculturalism, euthanasia, and so on.  This, too, led to an air of satisfaction, even smugness, a self-congratulatory notion of living in the finest, freest, most progressive, most decent, most perfectly evolved playground of multicultural utopianism.  [Ibid., p.11.]

Now most of that self-congratulation has been rattled.