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Forcing All Hospitals To Allow Euthanasia Key Election Plank of Belgian Ruling Party

By Hilary White
BRUSSELS, April 19, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The ruling party of Belgium, the Vlaamse Liberalen en Democraten (Flemish Liberal Democrats or Open VLD), wants to force every hospital in the country to install euthanasia protocols for patients who request it.

Since 2002, Belgian law has allowed doctors to help kill patients who, during a terminal illness, express a wish to hasten their own death. Belgium was the third jurisdiction in the world after the Netherlands (April 1, 2002) and the state of Oregon (1997) to legalize active euthanasia.

The Socialist who helped draft Belgium’s euthanasia law, Senator Philippe Mahoux, gave the doctrine of total personal autonomy, a key theory in secular bioethics, as the reason for the necessity for euthanasia. He said the dying patient should be “the only judge of their quality of life and the dignity of their last moments.”

The party calls this shift away from the traditional medical ethics one of the “ethical achievements” the policy is meant to safeguard. The Open VLD, a cartel of Belgian political parties running in the 2007 elections, announced that the government must monitor all health care institutions which receive government funding to offer the “service” of death for patients.

Under the law, physicians may opt out, but the hospital must then ensure that the patient's request is carried out by another doctor.

When the law passed, Belgium's Catholic bishops tried to explain their opposition saying the total autonomy theory “is based on the idea that the value and dignity of a human being is no longer linked to the fact of his existence, but rather to his so-called 'quality of life'.”

Alex Schadenberg, executive director of Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, responded to the announcement, asking, “How can the Belgium government ensure that the most vulnerable in society are being protected, when the ‘right to die’ stops being an exception but in fact becomes the rule of law?”

Shadenberg said the law is double-edged and not only creates pressure for a “duty to die” for the patient, but a “duty to kill” for the physician. “A physician who believes that effective alternatives to euthanasia exist and is unwilling to abandon his patients by killing them will be ignored as a religious extremist under this regime,” Schadenberg warned.

2007 is an election year in Belgium and the proposal was tabled as part of the Open VLD’s electoral platform presented on Wednesday. Since the creation of the Belgian state in 1830 Belgian politics has been dominated by a broad three-way split between Catholics, who represent a majority of the population, the Liberal Party from which the Open VLD evolved, and the Socialists.

Other parties have formed and some strongly oppose euthanasia on moral grounds including the Vlaams Belang (VB), currently the second most important party in Flanders and one of the largest parties in the country. VB also supports natural marriage and family life through tax reform and opposes same-sex marriage and adoption by homosexual partners. VB also opposes abortion except in cases of rape or for medical threats to a mother’s life and supports relaxation of the country’s strict adoption laws.

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Belgian Government Prosecuting Homeschool Family for Political Dissent
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/jun/06061506.html

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