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One has to ask – if scenes of vicious police violence towards unarmed protesters had been witnessed at, say, a Black Lives Matter event, would we ever hear the end of it? Would it not roundly be condemned by every media outlet and politician in the Western world as a heinous breach of human rights, […]
Just a third of migrants ordered to leave do so
Foreign observers might have the impression that it is always open season for euthanasia in the Netherlands. Not so. While the guidelines are elastic and subject to interpretation, they do exist and people violating them risk prosecution. A recent story on euthanasia in the Netherlands illustrates this. A pillar of Dutch policy is that only […]
Here are the latest figures for euthanasia in the Netherlands, drawn from the 2020 annual report. With 6938 deaths by euthanasia, this accounted for 4.12% of all deaths. (If the estimated 15,000 extra deaths from Covid-19 were put aside, the rate would be 4.52%) There were two cases of euthanasia for Covid-19 in 2020. With […]
JAMA Internal Medicine hosted a fiery debate about Dutch euthanasia this week. Geriatrician Diane Meier, of the Icahn School of Medicine, New York, responded feistily to critics of an editorial which she had written in December, headlined “The Treatment of Patients With Unbearable Suffering—The Slippery Slope Is Real”. Two teams of Dutch physicians responded with reassurances that “all […]
Most requests for euthanasia in the Netherlands come from people suffering from cancer. But the number of patients who have dementia, psychiatric disorders, or multiple geriatric syndromes (MGS) is growing steadily. An article by Dutch physicians in JAMA Internal Medicine examines the kind of geriatric syndromes which motivate a person to ask for euthanasia. They found that […]
New figures from the Netherlands have shown that suicide numbers went up by 34% in that country after assisted suicide was legalised – at a time when the numbers of deaths by suicide fell in neighbouring countries in the same period. Professor Theo Boer, who at first supported the euthanasia law and was a member […]
“Anti-euthanasia lobbyists want the public to believe in the inevitability of the slippery slope, but their fears are unwarranted, wrote a Canadian doctor earlier this year. Where better to test this than the Netherlands? In 2019, according to the official figures, there were 6,361 cases of euthanasia – 4.2 percent of all deaths. In other words, one […]
The only specialised euthanasia clinic in the Netherlands has closed its doors during the coronavirus pandemic. The Euthanasia Expertise Center, formerly known as the End of Life Clinic (Levenseindekliniek), is located in The Hague and provides counselling and euthanasia services for patients whose GPs refuse to authorise euthanasia. According to its website, “In the interest of […]
Parliamentarian Pia Dijkstra will table her bill early next year for those who are reportedly “tired of life”.
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