Excerpt:
The doctor who performed the Netherlands’ first case of euthanasia on a child under 12 did so with due care, the supervising committee concluded after investigating. The patient, a child of nearly 2 years who suffered from several severe medical conditions, died at the end of 2025.
Which at that point becomes a decision that is made by the parents, not the state. The state can’t decide for you that you will be euthanised. That is a decision to be made either by the person in question, or in the case of a two-year-old their parents.
The alternative would be to not allow euthanasia on young children at all, and force this child to live with their disease and experience hopeless and unbearable suffering for ten years, until they are twelve years old. That was the old cut-off point for decisions like this.
The way I see it, is that giving parents to ability make this decision on their child’s behalf, in order to make sure their child doesn’t have to needlessly suffer, can be a good thing if done carefully and thoughtfully. The checks and balances are there to make sure that is gets done carefully and thoughtfully.
I certainly wouldn’t call that an erosion of the west as per your first comment.
So because another country might not be deliberate in the way they implement their version of euthanasia, we shouldn’t be implementing our version of euthanasia?
Edit: Removed the quote characters around “erosion of the west”, because it isn’t a direct quote. It’s a paraphrasing, and it’s disingenuous of me to put that in quotes.
I have to get this straight because you are again misrepresenting my statement. Europe and the United States are in crisis. Right wing extremists are becoming political leaders. The erosion of the West is fact and not some reactionary comment dreamed up by someone envisioning hordes of outsiders flooding their continent. I did not call euthanasia itself a part of the erosion of the west, I was simply mentioning at a general development.
Secondly, I don’t believe the parents should decide. The nuclear family is a horrifically outdated model where the direct relatives get to play owner. I think it’s extremely worrying that the parents are affirmed in their role of “people who know best” at every turn in politics from left to right.
Yes exactly, and another country making mistakes doesn’t absolve the Netherlands if the Netherlands serves as law-inspo
So, I shouldn’t be using fire, as my neighbour could burn their house down because they saw me using it.
Got it.
Bad comparison
In that case I must apologize. I misinterpreted what you meant with that erosion. I also shouldn’t have written it as a quote as I initially did, since it was paraphrasing and not a direct quote. I didn’t mean to misrepresent.
That still doesn’t change the rest of my argument, however.
That’s fair. We differ in opinion on that, and I can see where you are coming from.
My issue with that, however, is that we then end up in a situation again where this child needs to spend ten years in whatever pain and agony they might be going through, just because they legally cannot make the decision by themselves.
Preferably that should not be happening, and giving the parents the ability to decide on their behalf is in my view an acceptable compromise to prevent that suffering from happening. While it is a decision with a lot more weight, we already do give parents a lot of power to make decisions for their child in other situations, so it is not entirely without precedent.
I think this is a ridiculous take. The Netherlands cannot be held responsible for what it didn’t do itself.
Thank you.
Yes, and this is why I say that helping families and children as much as possible is important. If it costs 30 million to support a child, so be it. How the weakest members of a society are treated indicates the over all health of a society.
I think you can’t view things in isolation. Lawmakers are acutely aware of the reception of their actions abroad.