Children arrange parents' joint euthanasia.

This article published on Wesley Smith's blog on September 26, 2014.

By Wesley Smith

Wesley Smith

If this doesn’t scare you, nothing will.

A doctor has agreed to murder/euthanize a healthy elderly Belgian couple who don’t want ever to live apart–and their three children approve. One even procured the death doctor. From the Daily Mail story:

Their son, John Paul, 55, approached their doctor to request their euthanasia – which was legalised in Belgium in 2002 – but the doctor refused because there were no grounds for it. John Paul found another doctor willing to perform the killings in an unnamed hospital in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium in which 82 per cent of euthanasia cases are performed. 

Francis said he and Anne were grateful for the arrangement. ‘Without our son and our daughter, it would never have succeeded,’ he said. ‘We are not sad, we are happy,’ he continued. ‘When we were told we could leave life together smoothly we were on a little cloud. It was as if we had spent all that time in a tunnel and suddenly we came into the light again.’ 

The couple’s daughter has remarked that her parents are talking about their deaths as eagerly as if they were planning a holiday. John Paul said the double euthanasia of his parents was the ‘best solution’. ‘If one of them should die, who would remain would be so sad and totally dependent on us,’ he said. ‘It would be impossible for us to come here every day, take care of our father or our mother.’

Imagine knowing your children don’t want you depending on them–because that is really what is being said.

If I told my mother I supported her euthanasia at 97, it would make her want to kill herself! Good grief.

The story is wrong that this would be the first joint euthanasia in Belgium of elderly couples – which I have covered here at HE at least twice before. It has also happened in Switzerland.

But that’s the way euthanasia rolls. Culture of death, Wesley? What culture of death?