The first Dutch case under its expanded child life-termination framework should horrify us—not because the child wasn’t suffering, but because suffering became the justification for intentionally ending a life that could never consent.
I have covered euthanasia and MAiD for years.
I have read the legislation. The committee reports. The cases. The sanitized medical language. The phrases designed to make something irreversible sound clinical, controlled and humane.
I know what I am looking at and this one has deeply upset me, I am angry. The person at the centre of this case was not an adult making an informed decision about their own body.
This was a child. Not yet two years old.
A profoundly disabled child with catastrophic medical problems whose life was intentionally ended by adults and now, in September 2026, the Dutch committee responsible for reviewing the case has concluded that the physician acted with due care.
I keep coming back to the same question…..how the hell did we get here?
A child cannot consent to death, the entire modern argument for euthanasia is usually sold through the language of autonomy.
My body. My choice. My suffering. My decision.
You may disagree with me about euthanasia for competent adults. Fine, but that argument collapses here.
A two-year-old cannot understand death.
A two-year-old cannot understand euthanasia.
A two-year-old cannot weigh treatment options.
A two-year-old cannot give informed consent.
A two-year-old cannot make a voluntary and considered request to die.
The Dutch system recognizes that basic reality. Ordinary euthanasia requires such a request, which is why children this young fall under a separate framework allowing physicians, under certain circumstances, to intentionally terminate the lives of seriously ill children.
That distinction should stop every one of us cold because we are no longer talking about someone choosing death for themselves. We are talking about adults deciding that another human being’s suffering has reached a point at which deliberately ending that human being’s life is acceptable.
That is an entirely different ethical universe and yes, this child was terribly sick. I am not going to minimize what this family was facing.
The child was born at 26 weeks.
There was extensive brain damage, severe cerebral palsy, visual impairment, serious seizures that were extraordinarily difficult to control, swallowing problems, breathing problems and other severe complications. Doctors did not expect the child to survive into adulthood.
According to the committee record, the child was developmentally around six weeks old at nearly two years of age, had no verbal development and had only minimal ability to communicate.
That is devastating, I cannot imagine watching your child suffer like that, I cannot imagine being told there may be no cure coming. I am not interested in sitting comfortably behind a keyboard and calling desperate parents monsters. That is not my argument.
My argument is that compassion for suffering cannot mean eliminating the human being who is suffering, there is a difference and we are losing it.
Then I read what the doctors actually said, this is the part that made me even angrier.
The first independent physicians consulted did not simply rubber-stamp what happened. According to the committee’s own record, those doctors concluded that the child’s condition was irreversible—but that at that moment there was not continuous unbearable suffering and that reasonable alternatives still remained.
Those alternatives included palliative options and additional medications that might have controlled the seizures more effectively. The physician attempted the recommended medication. The child experienced additional side effects and treatment was stopped.
The parents did not want prolonged sedation that would eventually result in death without fluid or nutrition, and the treating physician did not view palliative sedation as a reasonable answer.
Then another physician outside the region was consulted. That doctor reached a different conclusion: that the suffering was unbearable and that there was no other reasonable way to relieve it and the procedure went ahead.
Read that again.
The initial independent medical opinions said reasonable options remained.
A later doctor disagreed, and the child died. You can dress that sequence in whatever bureaucratic language makes everyone more comfortable.
I am not comfortable. The rules weren’t even fully written and then we get to the part that almost reads like satire if the consequences weren’t so horrifying. The regulation governing children aged one through twelve did not yet contain its own due-care requirements.
The committee therefore relied on requirements originally written for newborns, together with criteria approved by the Dutch paediatric association in October 2024. There was also no guideline for carrying out the procedure.
The committee’s judgment records that the physician actually searched for a protocol and could not find one.
Stop there.
A country expanded a framework allowing intentional life termination in children between one and twelve. The first reported case occurs, a child dies and the official record says parts of the framework and implementation guidance still had not been written.
Yet we’re supposed to feel reassured by the word safeguards.
I don’t.
“Handled with due care”
The committee ultimately found that the physician had acted with due care. That phrase bothers me more than I can explain, because “due care” sounds comforting.
It sounds responsible, professional, measured, safe…. but the outcome remains exactly the same. A child who was alive became dead because adults intentionally caused that death. That is not the same thing as withdrawing futile treatment.
It is not the same thing as allowing the natural process of dying. t is not the same thing as treating pain aggressively while knowing a dying patient may pass. It is not the same thing as palliative sedation. Intent matters, words matter here.
The Dutch framework itself recognizes that: the objective of the intervention is to end life because the suffering has been judged hopeless and unbearable.
That distinction matters enormously to me. I believe medicine should treat suffering, that medicine should aggressively control pain. I believe families caring for profoundly disabled children deserve more resources than most governments will ever provide them.
Nursing, respite, palliative medicine, hospice, psychological support, specialists, equipmen and financial support. Everything and when treatment has truly failed and death is coming, medicine should make that death as peaceful and humane as humanly possible but there is a moral difference between accompanying somebody through death and intentionally causing it.
I refuse to erase that distinction. What upset me most is there is another sentence in the committee material that I haven’t been able to shake.
The committee wrote that:
“All facets of ‘being human’—regarding motor skills, behavior, and personality—were severely impaired and were not going to improve.”Think for a second about that language.
Motor ability.
Behaviour.
Personality.
Developmental disability.
Communication.
Dependence.
Those things may be medically relevant when treating a person. Of course they are, but when the end result of an assessment can be intentional death, disabled people have every reason to ask where these judgments take us.
Human worth cannot become proportional to independence, humanity cannot depend on verbal communication. Dignity cannot depend on whether you can feed yourself. Your right to continue existing cannot depend on how “burdensome” your medical condition appears to somebody else.
That is the territory that terrifies me, this is why precedent matters here. The Netherlands expanded this particular framework in 2024 and officials estimated that no more than approximately five children a year might qualify.
This was the first reported case under that expansion and, at the time of the committee’s judgment, the only one.
Somebody will inevitably say:
It’s one case.
It was exceptional.
The child was extremely sick.
All of this may be true so I don’t need to exaggerate it. I’m not pretending thousands of children are suddenly going to die, but one case is enough to ask what principle has just been established.
A law changes then a framework is created, next the first case happens. A committee declares that it met the standard and that decision then becomes part of the guidance surrounding future cases. That not me making up some conspiracy, that’s just how precedent works.
My answer is still a hard, hard no.
I understand that people will read this case differently, some will believe the physician acted compassionately, cool. But I cannot. Some will believe the parents faced an unbearable situation and made the most merciful decision available to them.
I don’t need to hate those people to oppose what happened, I don’t need to call the doctor evil. My argument is bigger than one doctor or one family, I reject the philosophy that says there comes a point where intentional death becomes an acceptable medical response to human suffering and I reject it most agreesively when the person whose life is being ended can’t ask for it!
Care for the child, treat the seizures, control the pain, help them breathe, support the family, pour resources into their care and when death comes despite everything medicine can do, surround that child with comfort and love.
But please don’t tell me intentionally causing the death of this child is simply another form of health care, we have to stop with this nonsense.
Don’t clean it up with words like procedure. Don’t hide behind due care and don’t tell me autonomy justifies it when the tiny human being at the centre of the decision had none.
A two-year-old cannot choose to die by a doctors hands, so adults chose instead. That’s just the reality of what happened here. Then another group of adults reviewed their decision afterward and determined that the rules had been followed and I am supposed to find reassurance in that.
I don’t. I find it hyper disturbing. Why aren’t enough people saying something.
We need to hit the breaks hard. We are rationalizing kidding children, say what this is.
I believe future generations will look back at this era and ask how doctors became authorized to intentionally end human lives in the name of compassion. They will ask how suffering became confused with the value of the person suffering, and then they will ask, how young we were ultimately willing to go.
In the Netherlands, we now know at least part of that answer.
Not yet two years old and that should disturb every single one of us.
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