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In the Netherlands, Doctors Are Now Approved to Euthanize Alzheimer’s Patients

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The culture of death is like the universe: It never stops expanding. Once killing is accepted as an answer to human suffering, there are always new fields to inhabit.

In the Netherlands, euthanasia is supposed to be strictly restricted to mentally competent people who repeatedly request to be killed, and even then, only when it is the only way to prevent suffering. That’s always been bogus. For example, infanticide of seriously disabled and terminally ill babies is smiled upon by the society (see the “Groningen Protocol” with its bureaucratic infanticide checklist). Moreover, “termination without request or consent” has always been imposed by some Netherlander doctors with mostly no — or at most scant — consequences.

Now, current consent is being tossed in the trash. Dutch doctors are now allowed to kill dementia patients who have not requested to die and can’t consent, if they signed a kill-me-later request while competent. From the DutchNews.nl story:

The guidelines for performing euthanasia on people with severe dementia have been relaxed a little so that patients can be helped to die even if they incapable of making their current feelings known, the justice and health ministries said on Thursday.

However, they will have to have signed a euthanasia declaration with their family doctor before they became seriously ill to be considered for help in dying, broadcaster Nos reports.

So much for repeated requests made by competent patients. But then, protective guidelines aren’t meant to really protect, but merely to give false assurance.

Alzheimer’s often causes loved ones and medical personnel more suffering than the patient. (Believe me, I know.) How tempting it will be for the MD to put the patient out of the family’s misery. Or society’s, given the cost of care.

Image credit: Gouwenaar (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cross-posted at The Corner.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.

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