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Dutch Officials Tout no Reports of Infant Euthanasia in 2007 Despite Legality

Anti-Euthanasia experts believe unwanted children are instead killed by dehydration

 By Kathleen Gilbert

AMSTERDAM, November 18, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Dutch officials have told the Associated Press that there have been no reports of infant euthanasia in the Netherlands in 2007, the first year after the country officially sanctioned the practice. However, drawing on data from previous years, anti-euthanasia advocates say they suspect that some Dutch infants may have been intentionally killed by dehydration last year, a procedure that is not technically labeled "euthanasia."

The country was the first in the world to legalize adult euthanasia in 2001, and has since grown notorious for pursuing legalized euthanasia for people of all ages, including newborn infants. 

Years before infant euthanasia was legalized, Dutch courts had acquitted doctors who were charged with murdering babies who were born disabled. The physicians were acquitted despite the fact that they admitted to the practice. Acceding to medical experts who claimed unreported child euthanasia was already rampant, the Dutch government adopted medical guidelines in 2006 allowing children under 12 with "no hope of recovery" to be killed with parents' consent. 

A study published in 1997 in the Lancet determined that approximately 8% of all Netherland infants who died in 1995, about 80 babies, were euthanized by doctors - some without the consent of parents.  A subsequent study of 2001 deaths confirmed the figures.

The officials' recent statement on infant euthanasia likely refers only to children killed by lethal injection, as the Netherlands narrowly defines euthanasia to denote a voluntary and active cause of death.  Thus, according to Alex Schadenberg of Canada's Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, the report does not take into account infants killed by dehydration - a common alternative to the official form of euthanasia by lethal injection.

Schadenberg said that many children likely die in this manner, as death by removal of food and water is widely used for other age groups.  Because they are killed passively rather than actively, he says, such children don’t make it into official euthanasia reports.

"We don't know for sure, but I believe that this death by dehydration is most likely what's going on in the Netherlands for these newborns," Schadenberg told LifeSiteNews.com.

Schadenberg also noted that past reports touting reduced euthanasia in the country failed to take into account the deaths procured by leaving a patient to die of hunger and thirst, usually after having been deeply sedated, and sometimes without explicit consent.

The number of procured deaths in the Netherlands was estimated to account for a staggering 9.3% of all Netherland deaths in 2005, according to a 2007 New England Journal of Medicine report.

See LifeSiteNews.com article:

Media Spins Report on Netherlands Euthanasia to Falsely Suggest Numbers Have Decreased
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/may/07051404.html

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