Europe : Euthanasia Laws Broadened
"I want to choose my death".
"It's my life, it's my death".
Paul Rutten, author of an article published on June 30, 2014, on Correspondance européenne’s website, invites us to consider how the “derivatives” of the euthanasia laws are spreading in Europe, “the latest fashion being to make things easier for psychiatric patients, those who suffer from depression, and those who are ‘tired of living’. The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, to different degrees, show just how much their laws’ safeguards are nothing but smokescreens, aimed at masking the internal logic of a law that radically transgresses the commandment: Thou shalt not kill.
“In Switzerland, the German-speaking section of the association for help with suicide, Exit, decided in April to modify its statutes to allow elderly persons suffering from multiple pathologies linked to their age to obtain a lethal potion and a place to die. It is a way of saying that the sufferings of old age, be they great or small, are a sufficient reason to enter into the domain of the Swiss law on assisted suicide, which, in fact, does not require the candidate to have an incurable illness or to be in a terminal phase. Up until now, Exit and Dignitas, the two Swiss ‘providers’, had made this one of the conditions in their statutes. So the barrier is beginning to disappear.
“In Belgium, the application of the euthanasia law has over the years revealed the true nature of this law; strange cases are coming up more and more often these days. Several cases caused quite a stir. The euthanasia of a woman who suffered from an operation that had changed her sex, that of a couple that didn’t want to be separated by death, that of eighty-year-old handicapped twins who were growing blind and did not want to be unable to see each other… This reality understandably made the headlines. It was presented as the proof of the Belgian authorities’ lack of control and rigor. But the media coverage worked both ways, suggesting that euthanasia would be acceptable, if only it were well supervised.
“French-speaking countries hear much less often of the evolution of the practice of euthanasia in the Netherlands. Very precise, with multiple conditions, updated regularly and secured by a systematic follow-up by regional control commissions, the law is considered to a model for euthanasia laws. And yet the Dutch tendency is to broaden the law continually by means of the control commissions’ “jurisprudence”. They only rarely censure euthanasias that they examine a posteriori. While many Dutch doctors remain reluctant to practice euthanasia on depressive and psychiatric patients – 60% of them declared that it was ‘unthinkable’ in a 2012 survey -, the creation of an ‘life’s end clinic’ to welcome patients who have a hard time obtaining the death sentence from their doctor has caused these cases to multiply.”
(Source: Correspondance européenne – DICI no.298, dated July 4, 2014)
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