Related articles and links |  1 of 3

In the last week of November, the lower house of the Dutch Parliament passed a bill that made the Netherlands the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS). U.S. newspapers printed brief wire stories about the event, but our nation's editorialists and opinion writers were distracted by the Florida election.

In the first week of December, The New England Journal of Medicine published a report by four medical researchers, showing that 75 percent of those who had died at the hands of Jack Kevorkian, Michigan's grandstanding advocate of pas, were not actually terminally ill. Again the nation's newspapers printed only well-buried wire stories.

Unfortunately, the media focus on Florida, as important as it was, failed to keep us informed on developments with serious moral consequences; and it missed an opportunity to stimulate public debate on a vital public concern.

Here is some of what American readers missed:

1. The lower house of the Dutch Parliament passed a more restrictive bill than euthanasia and PAS advocates had been pushing for. Originally, the bill would have extended the age for euthanasia without parental consent as low as 12 years. Fortunately, this proposal of the radical D66 party was unable to garner a majority. But the new law still accords this level of autonomy to 16-year-olds.

2. The parliamentary vote was lopsided. The bill passed 104-40, reflecting the attitudes of the Dutch population, which some reports pegged at 90 percent in favor. Only the Christian Democrats and three small Calvinist parties voted against the bill. The upper house's approval of the bill this spring is expected to be a mere formality.

3. In Canada and the United Kingdom, PAS activists quickly used the event as a platform for renewed advocacy, but the German reaction was swift and negative. According to a UPI report, a spokesman for the Marburger Bund, a powerful association of hospital physicians, said, "Killing does not belong to the duties of a doctor." And Hartmut Steeb, secretary-general of Germany's Evangelical Alliance, said, "This law shows that the lessons from the human rights catastrophe in the Third Reich have not been learned."

In Germany, the moral memory of Aktion T4, Hitler's euthanasia law, is still alive. But the Dutch seem to have forgotten that Hitler's regime first sharpened its execution skills and tested its gas chambers on sick children and disabled adults from 1939 to 1941 before it applied its new technical expertise to Jews at Auschwitz and Treblinka.

4. The Dutch law still considers euthanasia and assisted suicide as crimes—unless it is performed by a doctor and under certain clearly spelled-out conditions. Advocates claim those conditions will help prevent abuse.

But for more than two decades, euthanasia and pas have been tolerated by the Dutch courts within certain guidelines—and those guidelines have been regularly flouted. According to a 1999 study cited by Canada's National Post, of all the Dutch cases of euthanasia and PAS in 1995, 20 percent of the deaths took place without the patient's express consent, 56 percent were not motivated by "unbearable suffering" but by "loss of dignity," and nearly two-thirds were not reported to authorities as required.

Advocates of the new law, such as D66 leader Thom DeGraaf, say the new measures are "for people who are in great pain and have no prospect for recovery." But the widespread practice of ignoring the existing guidelines suggests, as Bert Dorenbos of Cry for Life has said, that such laws only amount to issuing the medical profession a license to kill.

next page... |  1 of 3

February 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 2