Once a society generally accepts killing as an appropriate response to suffering, there are few limits to the kind of “suffering” that will qualify for extermination. The Netherlands shows the danger.
Permitted in a decriminalized form since 1972–and formally legalized in 2002–euthanasia deaths are skyrocketing.
From the Guardian story:
The number of people euthanised in the Netherlands this year is set to exceed 7,000 – a 67% rise from five years ago – in what has been described by the director of the country’s only specialist clinic as the end of “a taboo” on killing patients who want to die.
Despite the dramatic increase in snuffed numbers–and people from the mentally ill, to the disabled, even to a woman in despair over childhood sexual abuse dispair over childhood sexual abuse being killed by doctors–the reporter swallows the nonsense that guidelines protect against abuse:
In 2012, 4,188 people were euthanised by doctors in the country, all of whom met the criteria laid down under the 2002 law that made it legal: a voluntary and well considered request in the context of unbearable suffering from which there is no prospect of improvement, or alternative remedy.
What. A. Crock. Studies have shown, as just one example, that hundreds of people were killed by Dutch doctors who never asked for euthanasia. That is murder under Dutch law but nothing meaningful is ever done about it.
Then there was the case of the woman with Alzheimer’s held down by her family as she struggled against being killed!
Guidelines, schimdelines!
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Demand by Dutch patients to be killed is growing so exponentially, a clinic has been organized to satisfy the demand, and it is recruiting death doctors to end the lives of the sick and despairing:
The clinic is a charity whose costs are covered by a standard Dutch health insurance policy.
Steven Pleiter, director at the clinic, said that in response to growing demand he was now on a recruitment drive aimed at doubling the number of doctors and nurses on his books willing to go into people’s homes to administer lethal injections to patients with conditions ranging from terminal illnesses to crippling psychiatric disorders.
Pleiter has 57 doctors on call but he believes he could need more than 100 by the end of next year with a growing number of people in Dutch society seeking an organised death.
Because there can never be enough euthanasia. This is a warning to the US, which has not–yet–generally fallen prey to euthanasia consciousness. In for the terminally ill, eventually in for the mentally ill and despairing elderly.
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Human Exeptionalism.
