2023-04-17 06:20:07
This decision was expected. In the Netherlands, the government has announced its intention toexpand euthanasia to children under the age of twelve. The government clarified that this option only concerned a “small group” of five to ten children under the age of twelve per year, “for whom palliative care options are not sufficient to alleviate their suffering“.
This will concern children with “an illness or disorder so severe that death is inevitable and […] expected for the foreseeable future,” said Dutch Health Minister Ernst Kuipers. In a letter to Parliament, he said that assisted dying would be offered “when it comes to the only reasonable alternative for a doctor to put an end to the desperate and unbearable suffering of the child”.
A reassessment in the coming years
Since February 2014, Belgium was the first country in the world to authorize without age limit minors “in capacity of discernment” to choose euthanasia. In the Netherlands, the decision might also be taken by the parents, in consultation with the doctors, if the child is unable to make this choice. This new provision should be published this year and might be reassessed a few years following its entry into force. According to official figures, 8,700 people had euthanasia in the Netherlands last year. The majority of patients suffered from a terminal cancer.
In France, Emmanuel Macron hopes for a law on the end of life by the end of the summer. “You rightly insist that active assistance in dying should never [soit] carried out for a social reason, to respond to the isolation which sometimes can make a patient feel guilty who knows he is condemned to term”, declared the President of the Republic. The Head of State has closed the door to any assistance in dying for minors “These few red lines seem to me to usefully frame the hypothesis of a French end-of-life model and constitute our starting point”, he underlined.
1681725394
#Netherlands #euthanasia #children #twelve
