Legalized Euthanasia — Worse Than A "Slippery Slope"

The author of the euthanasia bill, Bloc MP Francine Lalonde, dismisses objections to legal euthanasia as "slippery slope" alarmism. Calgary Herald columnist Licia Corbella analyzes the experience other countries have had with legalized euthanasia - and the consequences appear to be far worse than euthanasia opponents here in Canada could even think of:

The Netherlands has been practising the killing of patients for about 30 years. It was made legal on April 1, 2002. Euthanasia in the Netherlands started out as "mercy killing" only for terminally ill, elderly people with full mental faculty who repeatedly ask for death. Now in the Netherlands, anyone over the age of 16, suffering from mental anguish, can seek physician-assisted suicide. What's more, now mildly deformed infants are being killed in the Netherlands.

In a March 2005 New England Journal of Medicine report called The Groningen Protocol, it is revealed that babies born with spina bifida, cleft palate and other abnormalities are being killed by Dutch physicians.
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According to a 1991 Dutch report called Medical Decisions About the End of Life, by Prof. J. Remmelink, attorney general of the High Council of the Netherlands, in 1990 alone 1,031 people were killed by their physicians without their consent or knowledge. What I don't understand is how this fact alone doesn't stop the push for euthanasia cold. Of those 1,031 people murdered against their will, 14 per cent were fully competent and 72 per cent never expressed the will to be killed. In other words, those patients were given no choice then or ever again. That could be you or your teenager or your infant should Lalonde's bill become law.

Numerous other reports in the Netherlands made similar hair-raising findings. In 1995, 950 people were killed without their consent or "choice," and in 2005 (the most recent report in the Netherlands) 550 people were killed by their doctors without request or consent.

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You can't argue with facts. Licia is right; it's worse than a slippery slope — it's a vertical skating rink.