The Netherlands has finally ‘fessed up to all the facts surrounding a decision to legally execute a one-year-old last year—actually, almost two years old, as if that makes a difference. The execution, under the cover of euthanasia, was done in the name of compassion, because the child would have died anyway. Keep in mind, though, that this was not hospice care for a terminally ill child. Instead, it simply sped up the inevitable.
The news first broke in June, but few details emerged. Now, though, the Health Ministry has provided more details, which are horrifying. The Blaze sums them up:
According to the committee, the child was born prematurely and had severe epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and brain damage as well as other debilitating conditions.
Citing the physician who treated and ultimately euthanized the child, the committee said the child endured regular seizures, a sleep disorder, side effects from medication, difficulty swallowing and breathing, and increased risk of infection.
Based on the physician’s assessment, the committee claimed that “the likelihood of death at a very young age due to complications was considered very high.”
To make sure that everything about the execution was on the up-and-up, the first committee even consulted a second committee, which agreed that the child had a severe and irreversible problem that caused it distress. Having said that,
However, this second group also claimed that “there was no continuous unbearable suffering” and that “reasonable alternative solutions existed,” such as other medications and palliative care. According to the committee, the doctor indicated that he attempted the interventions the second group recommended but that the child’s condition only worsened.
The doctor then consulted yet another “outside” doctor, who agreed that ending the child’s life was the only way to alleviate the suffering.
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The varying opinions and treatment approaches raise an important question: at what point did the case move from “alternatives exist” to “death is the only solution”?
In the Netherlands, these were the conclusions justifying a death penalty:
- “The child was severely multiply (intellectually and motorically) disabled, and the prognosis was that the child would remain dependent on care for life for all activities of daily living.”
- “The child suffered from conditions with a limited life expectancy, without any prospect of improvement in quality of life.”
- “The suffering was determined by the permanent, severe brain damage with no prospect of any reasonable degree of development and the eventual permanent lack of any possibility of self-reliance.”
Significantly, these criteria potentially apply to many profoundly disabled people who are not terminally suffering in the conventional sense. In this case, though, it seems that for some people or organizations (the parents? the semi-socialized medical system? the private insurance companies?), this combination of dependency and eventual death was a bridge too far.
But of course, the central problem is that you can say the same about all of us: Many of us, at some point in our lives, usually when we’re old, will be dependent on others, whether family, private insurance, or the government, for care, and, of course, we’re all going to die.
In regions with legalized euthanasia, people are beginning to discover that the government or their insurance company, neither of which loves you, is frequently encouraging death as a good “treatment” plan. (See, e.g., the woman offered death in lieu of a new wheelchair or the elderly woman who went to the hospital for back pain and was immediately offered euthanasia without even getting a diagnosis.) The proponents of legalized euthanasia never imagined this would be the outcome.
They envisioned mentally competent adults faced with untenable physical suffering making a reasoned decision to end it all in a painless, reliable fashion. Many made the argument that these death choices were safer in the hands of a beneficent government than they would be if they were greedy family members trying to preserve their inheritance from hospital bills. In Canada, which has generated an enormous amount of euthanasia stories recently, so we can see how it plays out, the beneficent government has so enthusiastically offed people that, in 2024, euthanasia accounted for 5% of all deaths, making it the third most common immediate cause of death, regardless of the underlying problem.
I don’t want to discount the suffering of that dead child in the Netherlands, nor of the family members who suffered along with it. I just think it’s very important to understand that, once a government has granted itself the license to kill you because (a) you’re a burden who suffers, even if only intermittently, and (b) you’re going to die eventually (as we all are), it has effectively signed a preemptive execution authorization for every one of us.
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Image created using AI.