Dutch euthanasia pioneer: Law is “running amok”, dementia patients being “executed”
from SPUC:
Boudewijn Chabot, a Dutch euthanasia advocate, has written a lengthy opinion piece denouncing the eroding of safeguards for vulnerable patients.
Chabot was prosecuted for the 1991 assisted suicide of a 50-year-old healthy woman suffering from “existential distress.” Though he was found guilty of the crime, he wasn’t punished. The case became a landmark, however, leading to the Euthanasia Act of 2002, which legalised, by statute, assisted suicide and euthanasia in the Netherlands. Chabot is completely in favour of “self-determination” when it comes to euthanasia, writing chillingly that the continuing increase of cases “does not disturb me – even if the number exceeds tens of thousands in a few years.”
Execution of dementia patients
However, he says, “what does worry me is the increase in the number of times euthanasia was performed on dementia patients, from 12 in 2009 to 141 in 2016, and on chronic psychiatric patients, from 0 to 60.”
He recounts some of the horrific cases of patients of advanced dementia being euthanized without consent, such as one woman whose coffee was drugged, and who when she tried to struggle was held down by her family, and another where a husband mixed sleep medication in the porridge of his demented wife before the GP arrived with his deadly syringe. He describes both of these cases as “executions”.
What is happening?
“To understand what has gone wrong, the reader must know the three most important ‘due care criteria’ of the law. There must be: 1) a voluntary and deliberate request; 2. unbearable suffering without prospect of improvement; 3. No reasonable alternative to euthanasia,” he says.
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