Posted on 11/30/2004 11:17:14 AM PST by Pyro7480
Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies
By TOBY STERLING, Associated Press Writer
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Raising the stakes in an excruciating ethical debate, a hospital in the Netherlands — the first nation to permit euthanasia — recently proposed guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns, and then made a startling revelation: It has already begun carrying out such procedures in a handful of cases and reporting them to the government.
The announcement last month by the Groningen Academic Hospital came amid a growing discussion in Holland on whether to legalize euthanasia on people incapable of deciding for themselves whether they want to end their lives — a prospect viewed with horror by euthanasia opponents and as a natural evolution by advocates.
In August, the main Dutch doctors' association KNMG urged the Health Ministry to create an independent board to review euthanasia cases for terminally ill people "with no free will," including children, the severely mentally retarded, and people left in an irreversible coma after an accident.
The Health Ministry is preparing its response to the request, a spokesman said, and it may come as soon as December.
Three years ago, the Dutch parliament made it legal for doctors to inject a sedative and a lethal dose of muscle relaxant at the request of adult patients suffering great pain with no hope of relief.
The Groningen Protocol, as the hospital's guidelines have come to be known, would create a legal framework for permitting doctors to actively end the life of newborns deemed to be in similar pain from incurable disease or extreme deformities.
The guideline says euthanasia is acceptable when the child's medical team and independent doctors agree the pain cannot be eased and there is no prospect for improvement, and when parents think it's best.
Examples include extremely premature births, where children suffer brain damage from bleeding and convulsions; and diseases where a child could only survive on life support for the rest of its life such as spina bifida and epidermosis bullosa, a blistering illness.
The hospital said it carried out four such mercy killings in 2003, and reported all cases to government prosecutors — but there have been no legal proceedings taken against them.
Catholic organizations and the Vatican have reacted with outrage to Groningen's announcement, and U.S. euthanasia opponents contend that the proposal shows the Dutch have lost their moral compass.
"The slippery slope in the Netherlands has descended already into a vertical cliff," said Wesley J. Smith, a prominent California-based critic, in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
Child euthanasia remains illegal everywhere. Experts say doctors outside of Holland do not report cases for fear of prosecution.
"As things are, people are doing this secretly and that's wrong," said Eduard Verhagen, head of Groningen's children's' clinic. "In the Netherlands we want to expose everything, to let everything be subjected to vetting."
According to the Justice Ministry, four cases of child euthanasia were reported to prosecutors in 2003. Two were reported in 2002, seven in 2001 and five in 2000. All the cases in 2003 were reported by Groningen, but some of the cases in other years were from other hospitals.
Groningen estimated the protocol would be applicable in about 10 cases per year in the Netherlands, a country with 16 million people.
Since the introduction of the Dutch law, Belgium has also legalized euthanasia, while in France, legislation to allow doctor-assisted suicide is currently under debate. In the United States, the state of Oregon is alone in allowing physician-assisted suicide, but this is under constant legal challenge.
However, experts acknowledge that doctors euthanize routinely in the United States but that such practice is hidden.
"Measures that might marginally extend a child's life by minutes or hours or days or weeks are stopped. This happens routinely, namely, every day," said Lance Stell, professor of medical ethics at Davidson College and staff ethicist at Carolinas Medical Center in the United States. "Everybody knows that it happens, but there's a lot of hypocrisy. Instead, people talk about things they're not going to do."
More than half of all deaths occur under medical supervision, so it's really about management and method of death, Stell said.
I'm afraid her high school is rather OVERrepresented at W&L. She was making conversation with a couple of students before we sat in on a Japanese History lecture, and they asked what school she was from - when she told them, one girl said, "OMG! Another one!" :-D
If she can go Ivy, she should. It opens a lot of doors in life and the Princeton student body is pretty middle of the road politically.
That being said, W&L is a great school with a beautiful campus. Though I liked the school immensely, I turned them down for both undergrad and law school.
"But for the hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars that goes to pork in this government, no one's going to tell me it's not worth doing what's noble and re-affirming to humanity. "
100% agreement. Have you looked at all the pork in this year's budget? Several million for the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland? A few million more for the American Preservation of Shrimp? Meanwhile, Pell Grants are being cut?! We're cutting educating our children so that people can learn about entertainers and shrimp can be protected? THIS is what a GOP Congress has given us?! God, you oughta take a look at the total waste pork being dolled out to the big-money contributors in this year's budget. It's truly disgusting.
Yeah - if you could get politicians (R and D, btw) to stop bending over backwards for their contributor-constituents, maybe there'd be money left over for things that matter, such as this.
Where did you wind up?
"Someone who does not believe in God (I'm not saying that you're one of them) "
I'm not so sure anymore, based on events and observations in my own life. But, I still value human life. Life is the only thing that all religions and atheists (also a religion, IMO!) should agree upon - that we're all here and alive now. Bottom line - I'm not in favor of forced euthanasia, but I'm not in favor of breaking the parents either.
"You sir have made a "Choice" to be blind about this one."
Nope. Please step aside, as there are a few of us here who are having an intelligent discussion and sharing ideas and beliefs. You've made a 'Choice' to ignore everything in this thread but one sentence of a post.
Besides, if Holland started rounding up all the Muslims for deportation based on their current events, you'd probably be cheering their efforts, rather than noting the 'Hitlerian references.'
Buh bye.
Oh, and W&L has the highest per capita consumption of beer among undergrads in the country. It's got quite a reputation as a party school.
But the authoritarianism of neoconservatist philosophy has borrowed this, too. What you point out is one of the saddest parts to the downfall of conservatism--the backing away from individual rights.
In fact, many Pro-Life groups also make their point by saying, basically, "the effect on society of the lack of morality overrules the individual's decision to have an abortion." That's the wrong approach.
When anti-abortion [sic] groups focus on the fact that abortion takes away the baby's individualism, then they are on the right track, but when a group becomes Pro-Life [sic] at the expense of the Individual's rights and says, "People's right to self-deliverance should be taken away!" then they have gone too far.
Living wills must be respected, and it's very clear (in this article) that not having a clear one written out makes a mess of things when you are incapacitated.
See my post #118.
Don't assume all of these children would die. I didn't. And my mother gladly spent her life savings and would have done it even if I only lived a few weeks.
Are you a parent?
Even though Princeton "officially" outlawed frats, the eating clubs did a lot of serious elbow-bending. It was not unusual to see somebody incapably drunk on Prospect at 10 in the morning.
Of course, that was back in the 70s, I have no idea what's going on up there these days.
I'm with you on that. I hope you've written out an advance directive/living will and have notified your family/health care provider.
The problem is that there are people whose wishes aren't known...and as can be seen in the Schiavo case in Florida, without written guidance, decisions have to be made that might not be exactly what the patient would prefer...
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I know that I wouldn't want my tax dollars to go towards such health care expenses.
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There are some things more important than money.
Keep in mind, the more rigorous the academics at a school the less drinking and partying. Despite their reputation, one thing I've noticed at various Ivies is that the kids are way too busy with academics to spend their nights partying. They live a pretty puritan existence.
Question: Since we don't allow these people to be euthanized in America, doesn't that mean we're already subsidizing it?
I guess you're coming at it from an angle of the growing cost of healthcare. In which case, there will be a reckoning across the board, one day. This is why if we give ground on these people today, it will be much easier in the future to go down the pecking line (CP, MS, Lupus, MD, CF) and just "weed" out sufferers in order to relieve the healthcare system in general... It's not a future we want.
Moral Absolutes ping over here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1291352/posts?page=1
When they were wooing me, one of their selling points was that even though W&L was 2/3rds male, the various girls' colleges in the area run buses down to W&L on weekends for the parties. They really tried to play up the campus social scene.
What are the tenets of atheism?
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