Canada’s increasingly enthusiastic embrace of euthanasia has received most of the attention lately, but the Dutch also continue to blaze a path to the lethal practice’s normalization. Here are the latest concerning statistics, as reported by DutchNews:
- Euthanasia killings rose by nearly 14.1 percent in 2022, totaling 8,720 deaths. That’s 5.1 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands. Since about half of deaths come from things such as accidents or sudden heart attacks, that means around 10 percent of deaths in which a patient was under medical care were from lethal jabs. The same percentage of USA deaths would total would be about 170,000 annually, or as many people as live in Ontario, California. (The USA totals about 3,400,000 deaths per year.)
- 115 mentally ill people were euthanized in the Netherlands (sometimes conjoined with consensual organ harvesting).
- 379 elderly couples received joint euthanasia. In the past, this has sometimes meant that one spouse was very ill and the other less debilitated but wanted to avoid the grief of widowhood.
- 288 people with dementia were euthanized. In the Netherlands, killing can be ordered ahead of time by filling out an advance directive.
The Dutch demonstrate that once killing becomes an acceptable means of eliminating suffering, the numbers of people who die by euthanasia steadily increases — as do the acceptable causes of suffering used to justify killing. Indeed, eventually, euthanasia will encompass the terminally ill, the chronically ill, people with disabilities, psychiatric patients, ill children, and disabled babies — ultimately leading to death on demand (as it has already come to in Germany, after that country’s highest court created a right to a “self-determined death“).
It should be clear by now that it isn’t a matter of whether there will be a “slippery slope,” but of how long the slide will take. That’s the debate we should be having, not whether doctor-hastened death will be limited to the terminally ill. Because logically it can’t be, and ultimately, it won’t be.