Dutch euthanasia clinic lethally injects woman who didn't want to live in a nursing home.

By Alex Schadenberg

Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Euthanasia Clinic

A recent article by Professor Theo Boer, a Dutch ethicist who has been a member of a euthanasia monitoring committee in the Netherlands for 9 years, warned the rest of the world to not legalize assisted suicide or euthanasia.

An article published by DutchNews.nl explains that a euthanasia clinic was reprimanded for the death of an elderly woman, who had a stroke and died by euthanasia because she didn't want to live permanently in a nursing home. It sounds like elder abuse to me. The article stated:

The euthanasia monitoring committee said the clinic’s experts had failed to exercise proper care when carrying out their duties. The public prosecution department is now investigating the case, Trouw reported on Wednesday. 

Theo Boer

In his article, Boer wrote that he had supported the Dutch euthanasia law, but after 12 years experience, he changed his mind based on the uncontrollable expansion of reasons for euthanasia:

Whereas in the first years after 2002 hardly any patients with psychiatric illnesses or dementia appear in reports, these numbers are now sharply on the rise. Cases have been reported in which a large part of the suffering of those given euthanasia or assisted suicide consisted in being aged, lonely or bereaved. Some of these patients could have lived for years or decades.

Boer concludes his article by urging the world not to legalize euthanasia because:

Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not likely to ever go back in again.

Whether the public prosecution department deems this euthanasia death to be acceptable or not, the woman is dead, the supposed "safeguards" didn't protect her, and the euthanasia clinic decided that death was preferable to living with the affects of a stroke.

Links to other similar articles:

• Dutch ethicist - Assisted suicide: "Don't go there".
• Euthanasia: Incremental extensions are inevitable. 
• Dutch health minister: 45 psychiatric euthanasia deaths in 2013.
• The Netherlands euthanasia law has derailed.
• Blind woman dies by euthanasia in the Netherlands.
• Mobile euthanasia deaths begins in the Netherlands.