Dutch Doctors Adopt Pro-Death Protocol, Euthanizing Newborns
by Fred Jackson and Jenni Parker
December 1, 2004
(AgapePress) - In the Netherlands, legalized euthanasia has reached a new and horrifying low. According to Associated Press reports, a Dutch hospital recently proposed guidelines for killing terminally ill newborns and then made an even more startling revelation -- it had already begun carrying out such procedures.Three years ago when the Dutch Parliament made it legal for doctors to give lethal injections to adult patients making such requests, many predicted that medical euthanasia would soon go well beyond such cases. That prediction has apparently now become reality.
News of what has been going on at Groningen Academic Hospital in the Netherlands comes just a few months after doctors in that country urged the nation's Health Ministry to expand euthanasia procedures to terminally ill people who are incapable of deciding for themselves whether they want to end their lives. The doctors included terminal infants and young children as well as the severely mentally retarded in their latest proposal to ease legalized euthanasia restrictions.
The Dutch law approved in 2002 that allows adults with terminal illnesses to request assisted suicide currently requires that young people under age 16 who are suffering from incurable diseases have parental approval before they can access the "benefit" of physician-assisted suicide. However, the newly proposed law would drop that limit to 12 years of age, thereby allowing doctors to euthanize terminally ill minors at age 12 and up, with parental approval.
But Groningen Academic Hospital, without waiting for the Dutch Parliament to consider the latest proposal, has pushed ahead to create and implement guidelines for its doctors to euthanize even newborn babies if they determine them to be in pain associated with incurable diseases or serious physical deformities. The guidelines, collectively known as the Groningen Protocol, allow an infant's euthanasia when his or her medical team and independent doctors agree there are no prospects for improvement. Babies that have suffered brain damage, those that are extremely premature, and those that cannot survive without life support can be killed under the new protocol.
Pro-Lifer Condemn Expansion of Dutch Euthanasia Guidelines
Pro-life advocates are shocked and saddened by these developments, as LifeNews.com reports. A coalition of 35 bioethics centers and institutions, the International Federation of Centers and Institutes of Bioethics and Personalist Inspiration, described the new guidelines as "an inconceivable injustice." And a Vatican spokesman, Bishop Elio Sgreccia of the Pontifical Academy for Life, stated that adopting the latest proposal would mean crossing "the final boundary" in disrespect for the sanctity of human life.
Also, LifeNews.com quotes a U.S. pro-lifer who monitors bioethics issues for the National Right to Life Committee, Lori Kehoe, as saying that, as hard as it is to hear of such atrocities being tolerated in the Netherlands, it should come as no surprise. "When you draw an arbitrary line on whose life is worth protecting and whose isn't," she remarked, "it is easy to move that line and hard to rationalize an outcry against it."
Groningen Academic is believed to be the only hospital in the Netherlands to practice euthanasia, and it has carried out a number of "mercy killings" in recent years. According to AP reports, the hospital conducted similar euthanasia procedures in 2003, reporting its actions to Dutch government authorities. However, no action was ever taken against the medical facility.
Ever since the Netherlands became the first nation in the world to legalize euthanasia, millions of Dutch residents have begun wearing bracelets informing doctors of their request not to be euthanized in the event of a serious injury. Meanwhile, the insidious influence of the Netherlands' example may be spreading through Europe. In Belgium, lawmakers are considering a measure that would expand that nation's legal euthanasia law to allow for the killing of children without parental permission.
And as Dutch authorities continue to allow doctors to push the envelope and relax "mercy killing" restrictions, the NRLC's Kehoe is concerned that euthanasia will increasingly be used on patients who do not want to die. She says already, in the United States, stories have come out about people who were non-voluntary victims of Oregon's assisted-suicide law.
Oregon is currently the only U.S. state that allows physician-assisted suicide. Nevertheless, the nation's pro-life community, the Catholic Church and other religious groups, bioethics and disability rights advocates alike are alarmed and dismayed by the Netherlands' child euthanasia proposal, and have joined an international outcry of opposition to the measure.
