The Dutch government wants to extend the euthanasia law to children

The Dutch government has reached an agreement to extend the law that allows euthanasia to also terminally ill children between the ages of 1 and 12. Dutch Health Minister Hugo de Jonge on Tuesday he announced this in a letter to Parliament, saying that it will spare some children from “suffering in an unspeakable and hopeless way.”

Today in the Netherlands euthanasia is permitted, obviously only under certain conditions, from 16 to 18 years old, with the consent of the children, and from 12 to 16 years old, with the consent of the children and their parents, and for children of less than a year, always with parental consent. Currently, for children with terminal illnesses and between the ages of 1 and 12, doctors and parents can only follow two paths: that of palliative care, that is, those therapies that have the sole purpose of relieving physical suffering, and that of the suspension of artificial feeding. Even with discontinuation of treatment, a child with more advanced terminal illness can take days or even weeks to die. Many doctors had asked for the law on euthanasia to be changed, considering the current situation a “gray area”.

The extension of the law has been much discussed among the four parties that make up the ruling coalition and the agreement was reached because of the conclusions of a study realized last year by the universities of Groningen, Rotterdam and Amsterdam according to which every year some terminally ill children suffer in particular because the doctors who treat them fear they will have legal problems in proposing treatments that could somehow approach their death. According to the study, the extension of the euthanasia law in the Netherlands would affect between five and ten children each year.

The amendment to the euthanasia law discussed by the government, which should be introduced within a few months, would also provide parental consent for children aged 1 to 12, as well as the favorable opinion of at least two doctors.

The Netherlands was the first country in the world to make euthanasia legal, for adults only and with very strict conditions, in 2002: only those who are forced to suffer unbearable suffering can ask for euthanasia and have no possibility of improvement. Last year there were 6,361 cases of euthanasia in the country, or 4 percent of all deaths; 91 percent of the people for whom the procedure was performed had terminal illness; the remaining cases concerned people with very serious psychiatric pathologies. The first country to legalize euthanasia also for minors was Belgium, in 2014: the first case of euthanasia on a minor took place in 2016.

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