Saturday, January 9, 2010

Legalized Euthanasia — Unreported, Uncontrollable, Unconsented...

That's what Dutch experience with euthanasia looks like. The numbers are going up, not all cases are reported and, as it turns out, many of those deaths are caused without explicit consent from the patient:
An article in the Dutch News reports that the number of registered cases of euthanasia rose by 200 to some 2,500 in 2009. The article also reports that, "It is not known how many cases of mercy killing there actually are in the Netherlands," because only about "80% of instances are registered with the monitoring body."
...
"In order to have an accurate picture of the number of deaths that are directly and intentionally caused by physicians in the Netherlands, you need to know that assisted suicide is a separate category in the Netherlands. Therefore you need to add the assisted suicide deaths to the number of euthanasia deaths. The number of assisted suicide deaths was not reported in the article but it is approximately 400 deaths each year," Schadenberg explained.

"Another category of deaths is deaths without explicit consent. The most recent government report (2005) showed that the number of deaths without explicit consent was approximately 550. Many of the 550 deaths are directly and intentionally caused by the physician but not reported as euthanasia because they lacked consent."
That's not much different than the bill C-384 with its "appears to be lucid" clause. What's being referred to as "mercy killing" is nothing but a straightforward killing. The fact that someone else believes that the patient is in such a bad shape that he would be better off dead than alive, doesn't justify intended death.

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