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.
I’m glad that child’s pain has ended. That’s what euthanasia is for, ending pain. We do it for our pets when their quality of life gets below a certain level. Why are people so against doing that for our human family members?
IMHO: everyone arguing against this, has never seen a person they love rotting alive. If every day is torture and you’re in the front seat, no amount of feel-good bullshit will change the fact that it’s a shit existence. If I ever get into that situation, I hope I can reach the train tracks.
Don’t go for the train tracks though. It fucks up other peoples lives.
I can only imagine how fucked the poor kid was to get this approved.
You’ll find that euthanasia of children is very, very old.
And why Roman matriarchs converted to Christianity.
As it seams that nobody reads the article and is just jumping to conclusions…
This child was born very prematurely, at only 26 weeks of gestation. It quickly became apparent that the child had suffered severe brain damage, resulting in severe cerebral palsy and a visual impairment. This was compounded by frequent and severe epileptic seizures, which were largely unresponsive to medication. This left the child restless and unable to sleep for long periods. They also had mucus in their lungs, which made breathing and swallowing very difficult.
Given the cumulative effect of these conditions, it was clear that the child would not live to adulthood. The doctor also determined that their suffering could not be alleviated through medical treatment. The doctor and parents, therefore, decided to actively end the child’s life.
Now think about that. That is a child that was not supposed to be alive in the first place (26 weeks! A pregnancy is usually around 40 weeks). It is suffering. The most humane way forward (for the child) is to end it’s suffering.
With great power comes great responsibility. We can maintain life in circumstances that otherwise would result in death but we have to deal with consequences of the variables that would not have allowed life. It is a very grey and uncomfortable situation to have our capability exceed our wisdom.
They suffered over 2 years of trauma trying to find a way for their child to live. The most humane way forward for everyone involved was to end the child’s suffering. I’m glad they had the option.
Yeah, this particular case is nothing to worry about. It was handled well. The real issue is that we’ve seen medical aid in dying be expanded very broadly in some countries. We’ve seen it expand into mental health issues. The real risk is that parents will start seeking assisted suicide for their children with Downs Syndrome or other developmental disabilities.
I can’t speak for other countries but so far in the Netherlands the rules are open, but extremely strict
Quite recently they allowed a teenager with mental issues to end her life with dignity because she was suffering for years with no view on any type of recovery. Yes, that is possible, but its also really difficult to get. No doctor would allow euthenasia on a child just because they are a bother to the parents, and IIRC, any and all of these requests have to pass panels of people who decided if it will be allowed or not.
The goal here always is to stop needless suffering
Then let’s talk about that if we see any signs of that happening.
From what I see, the Netherlands are not at any risk where you’d need to worry about it.
https://epaper.nationalpost.com/article/281483576985644
Canada has a big problem where some medical providers are essentially offering noting but medically assisted dying to some disabled patients who could do just fine with some funding for accessibility
Ok lets talk about it: https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/may/16/dutch-woman-euthanasia-approval-grounds-of-mental-suffering
29 years old, depression
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-netherlands-euthanasia-idINKCN12C2JL/
Proposal that didn’t get trough: pensioneers who feel their life is complete
Don’t bring “completed life” into this, it’s a completely different discussion
Sorry, but this is assisted suicide and not what I meant. Here the persons decide for themselves that they don’t want to live anymore. It is not very much different than them jumping off a cliff.
The OP here is about parents deciding for their newborn suffering child which is not able to decide for themselves.
If I was suffering like that, I would want that option. Of course, I’m an adult so…
This is where ethical discussions kind of stop working, because it is actually quite a complex matter and probably needs a lot of philosophers to come to a sane conclusion.
I mean, if we look at it in a rather economic way, a life basically has a certain value, which changes with time. Now, for each complication, the value gets lowered. When is the point reached, at which a life is not worth living anymore? One would think, this is a very personal and subjective answer. Now try to solve that problem for another human. This is just mind blowing for me to take such a huge responsibility.
I am glad, that they found a solution which they believe was right for them and the baby.
Just this summer I read a book about eugenics movement at the break of century. It was written clearly that there were various methods troughout the west until Nazis made the whole thing unappealing. Euthanasia was considered even back then the most radical of approaches.
while you might have red a book, it seems. perhaps you didn’t read this article.
The kid could not live, what would you do with a kid that was in immense pain and could not live, tell the kid you read a book and bid adieu ?
Paliative care exists
you don’t know what palliative care means.
I do and I think they should, in fact, have given the kid a lifelong morphine drip.
That little undeveloped central nervous system might as well enjoy the ride down.
All palliative care is, is making a person so high that they can’t feel it while they die slower.
It often involves removing feeding or water to speed the process up, when the body doesn’t want to die but is terminal.
I’ve seen it. My grandmother went through palliative care after a severe stroke. All it was was they stopped feeding her or giving her water so that she would die, and just jacked her up on morphine so she didn’t really feel it.
It’s not any more humane than euthanasia. It’s just more humane than the old school alternative of slow and painful death.
That’s not what Palliative Care is, or at least it’s not the only thing that it is. My Dad had palliative care when he got to the final stages of dementia, and it was the best thing we could have done. I will always recommend the form of care he got to anyone dealing with this particular issue.
Sure it is. Everyone should go out high as fuck on morphine.
They do that with euthanasia too. Just faster and more deliberate than getting high on morphine and dying slowly of dehydration.
So just pump the severely disabled child full of morphine for years, until it dies or is old enough to beg for death?
Sounds like torture.
Sounds fucking awesome.
(And it wouldn’t have taken long by all accounts)
Sounds like euthanasia with extra steps.
Wow, brilliant. I’ll bet all the doctors in Europe never even considered that, in their rush to execute a 2 year old. If only they had consulted your genius. /S
It would be all the doctors in Netherlands. Others seemingly manage without execution of 2 year olds.
Define “manage”? Are you saying that another doctor would have cured the child?
Spoken from a place of profound ignorance
I can confidently predict, then, that your solution to the Trolley Problem would be to not pull the lever.
The correct solution.
The solution that causes more death is the correct one?
The solution where you don’t kill someone is the correct one.
Lemme rephrase the trolley problem: you’re a surgeon. You have five people dying on the table, in need of an organ donor. A healthy young man with a broken leg shows up at the ER. Do you butcher him for parts to save the five dying people?
no, that is the incorrect answer,
to not pull the lever, the puller considers their culpability in the harm caused by their intervention. “morality is determined by the action.”
where as those who pull the lever decide on the morality by the amount of harm. “morality is determined by the results”
the ones who abstain on pulling the lever are not making a moral choice of the situation, they are preventing an action that can cause harm and assigning blame of the greater situations harm on someone else. a very self centered consideration.
you have no idea how organ donation works.
Not even apples and oranges, more like apples and gas giant planets.
The healthy patient is most likely going to survive and thrive for many years.
The two year old was going to die within a decade; would never be able to walk or talk; couldn’t even learn to feed themselves.
Five? It’s five million. There are five million people on the trolley tracks. The correct answer is to pull the lever and then run to try and save the one person on the other set of tracks. Any decent person would at least TRY to save everyone, even if they’ll fail.
A reactionary government would certainly try to expand the criteria for euthanasia. If the EU and other international bodies continue to erode, someplace in the West will certainly reinvent life unworthy of life.
Fortunately NL not only permits euthanasia in very strict cases, but the doctor is now undergoing a case review by prosecutors. This keeps every doctor performing euthanasia criminally liable.
Euthanasia so often gets portrayed as if it is just like an option at the buffet table that you can chose if you so feel like it. But that is not even remotely like how the system is set up in the Netherlands at all.
The only case in which someone is even eligible for euthanasia is if they suffer from a chronic illness, for which there is no possible cure, and you effectively will have to endure undue suffering for the rest of your life. And as you say, at that point it is still up to the discretion of the doctor, who is in turn liable for that decision. There is a whole bunch of checks and balances to make sure that it doesn’t just become a free-for-all.
This is not some ploy by some reactionary government to eradicate “life unworthy of life”, as distal@lemmy.ml suggest
You don’t understand. The child, while suffering extremely, is in no way able to consent to their killing. The state sanctions it as ok, as long as a list of criteria are met. This signals to other powers, who view the Netherlands as a role model that state sanctioned involuntary killing in medicine is fine, as long as you have a long list of reasons you can go through.
Compare it to Germany implementing Palantir, which has signalled to other nations that Palantir is fine.
It is not a ploy by a reactionary government, that is not what I was saying. I was saying that it is something a reactionary government can and in fact will use to get rid of what is considered less pretty and detrimental to unifying a nation/building a national ideal.
Well the child was so severely disabled and had such severe brain damage, that he could never, ever in his life, consent to anything in the first place.
His entire existence was hell. Drowning in his own lungs just trying to breathe, constant seizures with no treatment, an underdeveloped brain that couldn’t even form thought but only feel pain.
There’s truly no good answer here. On one hand, you are indeed ending a human life.
On the other hand, that life was nothing but a hell you couldn’t even imagine, 24/7. His entire life had zero joy in it. Ever. And no matter how long it lasted, it never would.
Prior to modern medicine, the answer would have been to leave the poor baby out on a hill and let the wolves eat it. Or just watch him die slowly and in pain because there’s nothing you can do.
The only “wrong” answer is to unnaturally keep him alive, in pain and suffering 24/7, just because “human life”. Of all the options, euthanasia is by far the most humane. That baby was NEVER going to grow up and live any sort of semblance of a normal life. That baby was in extreme suffering every second of every day of his short life. Suffering you could never imagine.
That baby was NEVER going to grow up and live any sort of semblance of a normal life
People said that about me. I had developmental issues, by far not as bad as the child you are referring to, but bad enough to make doctors believe I had epilepsy. Potentially a progressive form.
Someone I knew in school had muscular dystrophy. My developmental difficulties persisted into my young teens and the one thing I remember him saying to me was “the Nazis would have killed us both.” Where he is right now, I could not know. He might not be alive anymore.
People would have said we were suffering, or be under some kind of pain, despite our lives being full of worthwhile moments. Adults tend to say things that make reality feel comprehensible. A defenceless child is the victim of the narcissistic adult who is unable think beyond their feelings and perception of reality. The narcissistic need to feel in control and competent borne from a society where it’s everyone against everyone.
It feels like a punch in the face. People making a show of the suffering or what they perceive to be suffering while at the same time not advocating for a morsel of assistance to disabled people. In fact, they would maintain that killing the disabled person is sufficient assistance. Inequality in healthcare, lacking support networks, ableism, all swept under the rug while crying “look at the suffering!”
You are dramatically downplaying the suffering of this baby though.
He was in constant agony. Constantly drowning in his own mucus. Severe seizures that would not respond to treatment. He was functionally blind, and also could barely move his own body due to the severe cerebral palsy.
Have you ever been close to drowning or waterboarded? It’s one of the worst feelings imaginable. It’s extremely painful to not be able to breathe, and you have a massive wave of primal fear from the feeling of death. And this baby was in that 24/7. He was also in severe pain because of the constant epileptic seizures. And trapped in a body that he couldn’t even move.
They didn’t just up and say “fuck it, kill him”. They tried for nearly two years, since birth, to do everything they could to medically help him. Nothing worked. The baby was living in hell. Constant extreme pain.
I feel for his parents. I can guarantee that it was a horrific decision they had to make. But at the end of the day, letting the baby they love continue to exist in pure constant agony with no hope of ever alleviating it, is far less humane.
Well, we’ll see how history will play out.
You don’t understand. The child, while suffering extremely, is in no way able to consent to their killing. The state sanctions it as ok, as long as a list of criteria are met.
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.
This signals to other powers, who view the Netherlands as a role model that state sanctioned involuntary killing in medicine is fine, as long as you have a long list of reasons you can go through.
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 certainly wouldn’t call that an “erosion of the west” as per your first comment.
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.
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?
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
I did not call euthanasia itself a part of the erosion of the west, I was simply mentioning at a general development.
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.
Secondly, I don’t believe the parents should decide.
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.
…Another country making mistakes doesn’t absolve the Netherlands if the Netherlands serves as law-inspo
I think this is a ridiculous take. The Netherlands cannot be held responsible for what it didn’t do itself.
misinterpreted what you meant with that erosion
Thank you.
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.
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 this is a ridiculous take. The Netherlands cannot be held responsible for what it didn’t do itself.
I think you can’t view things in isolation. Lawmakers are acutely aware of the reception of their actions abroad.
Oh, well if the government says it’s legal that could never go wrong or be changed by a global tide of fascism trying to bring back the absolute worst parts of the last century.
I am unsure if the NL is going to stick to their strict processes, when we consider what happened in Canada under MAiD.
Errr…sure. Let’s hope the people there don’t start behaving like Canadians then.
You know who will feel pressured to put their child through this right now with it being a thing? Parents of lower socioeconomic standing. If you have a lot of resources you will be able to accommodate your sick child better, you might be able to give them dignified natural end of life care. People who have little money, workers, are not in that position. Involuntary killing is always related to class.
The problem is that a reactionary government is going to use anything to advance their agenda?
Name any government policy and I can show you a way it can be twisted to serve evil ends.
Get rid of old gas guzzling cars? New cars must have 24/7 GPS tracking ‘for safety.’
Environmental protection has historically not been associated with mass murder. Euthanasia on the other hand has been associated with mass murder. In some countries, Germany for instance, the word euthanasia itself is so dirty that no politician dare even hint at it when designing policy, and that’s excluding medical policy.
While that may be true, it doesn’t preclude the idea that euthanasia may be the best solution to a person’s problems.
I can both hate school shootings and believe that individuals have the right to own weapons.
Also, If you look at the history, the reason suicide is so hated is that the Church realized that the people who wanted to kill themselves were young women who didn’t want to marry old men and young men who didn’t want to have to work forever.
It wasn’t a ‘pro life’ policy, it was a ‘make sure these kids provide us with what we want.’
You are talking about decisions where there is consent from the affected party and cases that don’t correlate too well (guns and school shooting example, where there exist gun liberal nations that have relatively low rates of school shootings). A child cannot possibly consent to nor understand medical suicide. It’s not a dichotomy where it’s equally horrific that a child isn’t able to consent to a continued life (while suffering in some way) , because once euthanasia for a child is chosen, it is permanent, as opposed to the decision to keep a child alive not being permanent.
Suicide is hated because a lot of the time the person committing suicide regrets it the second they do it. Suicide is hated because life is the purpose of every living being, on some logical level it doesn’t compute. Suicide is also hated because it affects people of worse socioeconomic standing to a greater degree than people who are in a comfortable spot. The are of course exceptions with cases of severe illness, but they require a sound grown up mind!
Parents make decisions for children all the time.
Yes, and that is highly traumatic for children. Child rearing being an atomised, personalised thing of the direct relatives is not a historical constant. More communal forms of raising children have exist and will exist.
Yeah we came full circle. Dutchies are certainly pushing boundaries in areas I wish we left unexplored.
I don’t think people want this. Nobody sees an article like this and is like, “hell yeah, they killed a kid!”
This is a very complex, very difficult subject
I disagree. I think it’s valuable and important to come up with reasonable and humane policies that protect the sanctity of life, while also ensuring we don’t cause needless suffering. There is a boundary somewhere and whether or not you’re comfortable with that, some people will have to deal with being close to it.
In this particular case a hands off approach would have ended suffering all on its own and active medical intervention would have kept it going. Better to make the end as humane as is even possible anymore.
Although it’s true that this poor soul was not in a position to consent to death, the corollary is they were not in a position to consent to a life of mostly suffering either.
