Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Belgium's leap off the moral cliff

The New Yorker has an article on Belgium's leap off the moral cliff, their acceptance of euthanasia, physicians willing to euthanize anyone who asks and a man who wasn't informed of his mother's euthanasia until after she was killed.

In the past five years, the number of euthanasia and assisted-suicide deaths in the Netherlands has doubled, and in Belgium it has increased by more than a hundred and fifty per cent. Although most of the Belgian patients had cancer, people have also been euthanized because they had autism, anorexia, borderline personality disorder, chronic-fatigue syndrome, partial paralysis, blindness coupled with deafness, and manic depression......
He recently approved the euthanasia of a twenty-five-year-old woman with borderline personality disorder who did not "suffer from depression in the psychiatric sense of the word," he said. "It was more existential; it was impossible for her to have a goal in this life." He said that her parents "came to my office, got on their knees, and begged me, ‘Please, help our daughter to die.'"

FULL STORY