By Rev. Ken
Blank and Dr. John Campbell – Oklahoma Health Center Clinical Pastoral Education
Institute, Inc. Ó 2005
The Dutch doctors association, KNMB, in August,
2004, urged the Health Ministry of the Netherlands to create an independent
board to review euthanasia cases for terminally ill people with “no free will’,
including children, the severely mentally handicapped, and those in
irreversible comas, according to Toby Sterling reporting in the
January, 2005, issue of Science and Theology News.
The Netherlands is the first nation in the
world to permit euthanasia. Belgium followed this example since 2002 and
France is now debating legislation to allow doctors to end patients’
life-extending treatments. In the United States, only Oregon allows
physician-assisted suicide and this law is continuously challenged in
court, states the author. This request by doctors in the Netherlands is fueled
by the actions of the Groningen Academic Hospital, which has already started
to terminate the lives of terminally ill newborns. Four such “mercy
killings” were committed in 2003, each case reported to the Dutch government,
with no legal proceedings brought against the hospital. Yet, the Dutch Justice
Ministry stated that Groningen Hospital was not the only one reporting child
euthanasia cases: 14 were also reported between 2000 and 2002, preceding the
Groningen announcement and carried out in other Dutch hospitals.
Advocates of euthanasia view this as the logical
next step since the Dutch parliament, in 2002, made administration of a
lethal dose of sedatives by doctors legal if given to an adult patient who
requests it and is suffering great pain with no hope of improvement. Opposing
views hear this request with horror. Wesley J. Smith is quoted in the
article: “The slippery slope in the Netherlands has descended already into a
vertical cliff”.
Who decides when the patient, even a child, should be
killed in the Netherlands? The child’s medical team and independent doctors must
agree the pain cannot be eased and there is no hope for improvement, and the
child’s parents must “think it is best”. This raises questions: (1) what if
there are no parents or any family members, guardians legally or morally
obligated to represent the child’s best interests? (2) what safeguards exist to
prevent the doctors acting with a conflict of interest? (3) is there truly no possible
medical or scientific way to measure the level of pain or to ablate it or bring
it to knowable, bearable levels? Conversely, how would the doctors know
objectively if the pain is unbearable in the first place? (4) What happens if
there is no unbearable pain involved and it is a question of removing something
like a feeding tube (as in the Schiavo case in the United States)?
Consider this, too: is the decision-maker for the
incapacitated patient always the parents, If living, or the next of kin, or the
legally-appointed representative or….the entity paying for the continuing
feeding and/or medical care, such as the state welfare system? Or some
combination? Who decides in the event of a major conflicting
disagreement among the parties on the decision to proceed to euthanasia?
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