I was reading a column titled “Communication Gap: Eurotalk vs. Ameritalk,” By Wesley J. Smith, in the National Review On-Line. He was talking about how Europeans think versus Americans and I fell out of my chair when he skipped right past what should have been his story. Involuntary euthanasia of the infirm, helpless, elderly, poor Dutch is their national policy. These people are being overtly murdered rather than dying of neglect. And not only does no one care. It is approved by the public.
From the article:
In Lisbon, I began to comprehend the dramatic differences between the American and Old European approaches during a panel discussion I participated in on euthanasia. I was invited to the conference to argue against legalization. During my presentation, I made the point that the regulatory guidelines don't protect against abuses but merely provide an appearance of control, to calm public unease.As proof, I referred to several studies on Dutch euthanasia revealing that about 1,000 patients who have not asked to be euthanized are killed by doctors each year. Though such killings are considered murder under Dutch law, I explained that those doctors who engage in "termination without request or consent" in the Netherlands are almost never prosecuted. Moreover, the very few who are prosecuted are usually found not guilty. And the exceedingly rare conviction, when it happens, never leads to criminal sanction, or even professional discipline against the offending doctor.
When I make this point in debates with American euthanasia advocates, their response is usually to angrily accuse me of exaggerating, or else to excuse the conduct owing to the poor condition of the patients involved. But the Dutch advocate was not offended or upset. Rather, he calmly admitted that my point as unremarkable, stating, "Well, it is important that we have laws to tell us what constitutes good medical practice in this area. But, of course, these laws should not be enforced."
My jaw dropped. What's the point of passing laws if they're not going to be enforced?
To the Old European way of thinking, though, it apparently makes perfect sense. The guidelines don't exist to punish those who break them; rather, they're a vehicle for maintaining consensus and comity between those who support euthanasia and those who oppose it. Supporters have the satisfaction of knowing that euthanasia is available in many circumstances. Opponents have the satisfaction of knowing that legal restrictions limit the actual practice of euthanasia, at least to some degree. Hence, a controversial public policy that is an emotional flashpoint of the culture war in the United States is generally accepted with quiet equanimity by the people of the Netherlands — even though it has led to many thousands of Dutch patients being murdered without legal consequence.
Dutch doctors murder at least 1,000 undesirable people a year.
This is official Dutch policy
It is both known and approved by the Dutch people.
The Dutch people have gone Nazi in fact and in deed. All the worse nightmares of Euthanasia opponents have been realized in the Netherlands. This has been true for a decade at least. And no one is paying attention, even when it is looked at directly.
Lets be absolutely clear what I am talking about here. This isn't the American medical community’s refusal of treatment for reasons ranging from lack of payment from the indigent to lack of profit for insurance companies for long term terminal illness. This is the active taking of life by sticking needles into people's arms attached to vials of poison and pushing the plunger. The first is criminal negligence. The second is capital murder. It is a moral difference in kind and not degree.
It is time that the American people to act.
The Dutch medical profession should be shut out of all international medical organizations. American participation of any sort in such organizations should be based on the exclusion of the Dutch. Dutch cultural groups should be excluded from the US and Dutch physicians should be denied visas to attend conferences here based on the fact they could be serial medical murderers.
The Democratic Left should ask the UN to pass a resolution condemning Holland over its euthanasia policies and give them at least 250 years to reconsider the situation.
American Church organizations should act. Dutch Christian religious leadership is a contradictions in terms. They all speak with Satan’s voice, if they bother to speak at all. Shunning of them is the least that should be done. Serious American missionary efforts independent of local Dutch churches and the Dutch government must be both considered and executed.
As it stands, mass conversion of the Dutch to Muslims would mark a significant improvement in the Dutch moral climate. The old, helpless, infirm and elderly would still die unnecessarily, but from medical neglect and not from medical murder.
This is the evil that sits at the heart of the E.U. It is all about providing unaccountable power to people without souls, so they can victimize the poor and weak as they see fit.
And I am willing to bet that there is a very efficient bureaucracy in charge of keeping track of who gets the needle at what time, and what drugs are used in what amount, just to keep the billing all right and proper. Good Lord…
Good article. Poor solution. Poor because the problem goes much deeper, and what you propose will never happen until that deeper problem is fixed.
Here's the thing: Our medical community will NOT act, because its "ethicists" by and large share these values. American (and Canadian) institutions also deny care on grounds that have zero to do with payment, or HMOs, and share a great deal in common with the rationale behind Euthanasia in Holland.
Which means the problem is both closer, and deeper, than your analysis would indicate. It isn't as easy as pointing to the bad people over THERE. It's happening HERE, NOW, often in ways that are far more painful than lethal injection (dehydration is popular, and takes several days).
You simply must read Wesley J. Smith's "Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics In America." Smith's only flaw is that his tone is over the top sometimes when it would be better served by simply stating the facts and cases. For it has those in abundance, and they will make the point all by themselves.
Read it, folks! I have little doubt that it would launch a fleet of powerful and sorely needed blog postings. Even if that knowledge makes it harder to target the Netherlands as a unique example, I'd call it a worthy trade.
One more point, worth making. Even if the charges are true, and I believe they are, it does not logically follow that "the Dutch people have gone Nazi" as a blanket moral judgement.
They have a hideous policy that I believe may have some beneficial effects, but allows thoughtless evil and provides a cover for real evil. Good people ought to disagree with them on moral grounds about this, vocally. But that does not make the Dutch evil people as a whole, any more than disagreeing with America's approach to Iraq is license to brand Americans as evil people on the whole, or Nazis, or whatever. We see enough of that crap from the idiotarian brigades.
The Dutch did stand up to real Nazis not too long ago, under great duress. Pointing out the similarities with Nazi eugenics reasoning is a valid and sound debating tactic, one that carries persuasive power. Calling the Dutch Nazis is not, and does not.
There are enormous moral and legal differences between refusal to treat, and involuntary euthanasia through active measures.
I'm gathering that Smith gets his "1000" number from the Remmelink report of 1991, by a former Dutch attorney general. Too bad that he doesn't have the honesty to quote Remmelink entirely, else he might have to weaken his case by admitting that in those 1000 cases, the doctor and patient had discussed euthenasia previously, and the doctor was acting in accordance with the patient's wishes. At least that's what I hear Remmelink says.
You can check out the Discovery Institute's website at www.discovery.org. It's, er, interesting...
I have never looked in to the euthanasia issue with any great interest, but what is reported here is not terribly surprising, nor is the reported reaction of the Dutch representative to the conference. With the rise of the socialist mindset in Europe the idea that doctors might have incentive to do away with elderly patients who are clearly at the very last stages of a long process of dying is a given, and one could even make some sort of case that it is not entirely evil, so long as you are prepared to check your ethics at the door.
What you are presented with is pragmatism taken to an extreme, which is one of the nutshell characterizations of socialism. When you look at medical resources as a fixed and heavily regulated commodity (shall we call it rationing for the sake of simplicity?) then it makes perfect sense to cut one’s losses on cases where there is no realistic hope of a positive outcome. I am relatively certain (no, I have not researched this at all) that none of these patients were strapped to a table, pleading to be allowed to continue to live; however, if one is inclined to accept the “nose of the camel” concept it becomes alarming to consider what the future holds for a society which has begun to accommodate itself to the concept of “doing away” with people whom it feels are too expensive to support. If you also consider the earlier reported issues of the EU Pension problem and the likely decline of the EU economy over the coming decades and it is not difficult to see the threshold of what is considered “too expensive” being lowered substantially.
This is where European devotion to process can suddenly transform itself in to the road to damnation.
I was just given this link in email (click to see).
Um, sources, please? You also shouldn't believe a damned thing you read in NR, without a backup.
Jason McCullough -
Here's some fun reading for you: the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide has a nice collection of links regarding Dutch euthanasia. I think it's just as scary as Trent makes it sound.
Even if the figures cited in NR are bogus, there is still the issue of the Dutch representative not viewing it as a problem, unless you think that the NR writer fabricated the entire exchange (it's difficult to think where you'd get a second source for that).
I live in Holland and we are not going Nazi. Please.
You report 1000 illegal deads by euthanasia yearly. I don't argue that calculated guess.
Not long ago euthanasia was not regulated in Holland. Nowadays docters are obliged to document the proces (uncurable terrible suffering; second opinion; family approval; etc.), also when a patient actively demands euthanasia. Many doctors want to continue the old situation of non-intervention of government in doctor-patient relationships. And the chance to get caught by the police is of course almost nil. The number of 1000 is not reached by doctors gunshooting their patients but by benevolently stopping to give some treatment or by changing doses; exceptionally by injecting a deadly dosis. But when a doctor breaks the rules and get caught, he is being punished. I remember a family doctor who didn't ask for a second opinion - he is no doctor anymore.
In my calculated guess has in situations of extreme and hopeless suffering euthanasia always been practised by caring doctors, in Holland and elsewhere in Europe. It was always a doctor-patient-family thing, without government interference. But nowadays euthanasia is legalized and bureaucratized. A majority of the Dutch people approves, but many doctors feel criminalized. In fact they must give themselves up to the police and next prove they are innocent. Doctors are obstructing this law and that is bad, but Holland is not going Nazi. We think euthanasia must at all cost be avoided, and happily pain-killing medicaments are very effective. But sometimes the patient is uncurable, suffering unbearable and "request or consent" not possible. Then a lot of people, myself included, wish to enter a human doctor. I also hope my family to consent, and I definitely want the doctor not to act prematurely and consult colleges.
I was more or less shocked by your article. Has it to do with Saddam? I am pro-war and hate to see USA and Europe drifting apart. In these weeks I read many articles in which USA and Europe besmear each other. But as you are no War-mongers we are no Nazi's.
I suggest all and sundry go to this link:
http://www.internationaltaskforce.org/fctholl.htm
The following is a clip from the report at the link:
THE FACTS
The Remmelink Report-- On September 10, 1991, the results of the first, official government study of the practice of Dutch euthanasia were released. The two volume report (6)--popularly referred to as the Remmelink Report (after Professor J. Remmelink, M.J., attorney general of the High Council of the Netherlands, who headed the study committee)--documents the prevalence of involuntary euthanasia in Holland, as well as the fact that, to a large degree, doctors have taken over end-of-life decision making regarding euthanasia. The data indicate that, despite long-standing, court-approved euthanasia guidelines developed to protect patients, abuse has become an accepted norm. According to the Remmelink Report, in 1990:
· 2,300 people died as the result of doctors killing them upon request (active, voluntary euthanasia).(7)
· 400 people died as a result of doctors providing them with the means to kill themselves (physician-assisted suicide).(8)
· 1,040 people (an average of 3 per day) died from involuntary euthanasia, meaning that doctors actively killed these patients without the patients' knowledge or consent.(9)
o 14% of these patients were fully competent. (10)
o 72% had never given any indication that they would want their lives terminated. (11)
o In 8% of the cases, doctors performed involuntary euthanasia despite the fact that they believed alternative options were still possible. (12)
· In addition, 8,100 patients died as a result of doctors deliberately giving them overdoses of pain medication, not for the primary purpose of controlling pain, but to hasten the patient's death. (13) In 61% of these cases (4,941 patients), the intentional overdose was given without the patient's consent.(14)
· According to the Remmelink Report, Dutch physicians deliberately and intentionally ended the lives of 11,840 people by lethal overdoses or injections--a figure which accounts for 9.1% of the annual overall death rate of 130,000 per year. The majority of all euthanasia deaths in Holland are involuntary deaths.
· The Remmelink Report figures cited here do not include thousands of other cases, also reported in the study, in which life-sustaining treatment was withheld or withdrawn without the patient's consent and with the intention of causing the patient's death. (15) Nor do the figures include cases of involuntary euthanasia performed on disabled newborns, children with life-threatening conditions, or psychiatric patients. (16)
· The most frequently cited reasons given for ending the lives of patients without their knowledge or consent were: "low quality of life," "no prospect for improvement," and "the family couldn't take it anymore."(17)
· In 45% of cases involving hospitalized patients who were involuntarily euthanized, the patients' families had no knowledge that their loved ones' lives were deliberately terminated by doctors. (18)
· According to the 1990 census, the population of Holland is approximately 15 million. That is only half the population of California. To get some idea of how the Remmelink Report statistics would apply to the U.S., those figures would have to be multiplied 16.6 times (based on the 1990 U.S. census population of approximately 250 million).
The above is why I say the Netherlands has gone Nazi.
As for Dutch "regulation" of involuntary murder, this is from the same article:
"Falsified Death Certificates ---In the overwhelming majority of Dutch euthanasia cases, doctors--in order to avoid additional paperwork and scrutiny from local authorities--deliberately falsify patients' death certificates, stating that the deaths occurred from natural causes. (19) In reference to Dutch euthanasia guidelines and the requirement that physicians report all euthanasia and assisted-suicide deaths to local prosecutors, a government health inspector recently told the New York Times: "In the end the system depends on the integrity of the physician, of what and how he reports. If the family doctor does not report a case of voluntary euthanasia or an assisted suicide, there is nothing to control." (20)
"...the system depends on the integrity of the physician..."
Well, that pretty well sums it up. The system depends on an absent characteristic.
http://www.dialogue.org.uk/euth.htm
"The Remmelink Commission also established that although it might appear that 0.8% of deaths in Holland were caused by involuntary euthanasia this figure was misleading because at least half of these had given earlier notice of their wish for euthanasia when they became terminally ill, and in almost all the rest of the cases euthanasia had been performed when the patient was too ill to make his or her wishes known but where it was believed by both the doctors and the patients' families that euthanasia would have been the patient's wish if they had been able to ask for it.'"
What other bits are they leaving out at the International Task Force? To hear their side of it, Dutch hospitals are full of people skulking around, a poison needle in one hand, and in the other a pillow to muffle their victims' screams.
What happened to the multiple studies Smith's NRO article alludes to? What other errors and omissions exist that I haven't had time to track down?
While I do not wish anyone to be afflicted with cancer, I hope that if this "human being" and I use the term lightly. is ever unfortunate enough to contract cancer, that at the horribly painful end he be in the hands of a physician as "moral" as he is, and that the doctor says "NO" when he begs for death. I personally know of a person in the Netherlands who was in such a situation and there are those of us who believe that a doctor geve him a little extra morphine to "ease the pain" To have done otherwise would been pure torture. It is too easy to be moralistic when you are not the one screaming in agony.
While I do not wish anyone to be afflicted with cancer, I hope that if this "human being" and I use the term lightly. is ever unfortunate enough to contract cancer, that at the horribly painful end he be in the hands of a physician as "moral" as he is, and that the doctor says "NO" when he begs for death. I personally know of a person in the Netherlands who was in such a situation and there are those of us who believe that a doctor geve him a little extra morphine to "ease the pain" To have done otherwise would been pure torture. It is too easy to be moralistic when you are not the one screaming in agony.
Mr. Birmingham,
As Annoying Old Guy noted earlier, Mr. Smith reported that the Dutch "advocate" admitted the involuntary euthanasia statistics. I am a trial lawyer and recognize the game you are playing.
Mr. Telenko is quite correct that statistics falsified by self-interested governments aren't worth the paper they are printed on. That's why the Soviet Union is the world power it is today.
European crime statistics are equally valid.
Thanks for the gratuitous analysis, but I wasn't aware I was playing a game. I thought I was pointing out that Mr. Smith omits facts that damage his case, and thereby damages his credibility. The "admission" comes solely to us through Mr. Smith. Given that he saw fit, through ignorance or deception, to leave out a bit of the Remmelink report that weakened his case, while using more favorable parts in support, you can see that I do not consider him what you lawyers might call a reliable witness. His obvious motive for overstating the Dutch situation aside, there is a strong possibility that an American lawyer and a Dutch physician might have differing grasp of whatever mutual language they were speaking. Or maybe the Dutch person thought that the details Smith leaves out were important, while Smith did not, or was ignorant of them.
I cannot speak to the worth of the Remmelink report, but it's where Mr. Telenko's figures come from as well, so if it's worthless, I'd say your case just vanished, Counselor.
Finally, I will point out that what can be said about self-interested governments can also be stated about groups who hope to influence domestic policy by drawing on the example of successes and failures in other countries.
It is all about money. Dutch birth rates are low (specially between the real Dutch, who happen to be the richest and most prductive). They don't want to raise the age of retiremnt no matter what the progress of medicine and lengthening of scholarship. Of course this is absurd (think in what happens if medicine allowed people to live until 120 on average and they would still be retiring at 60). And it is finacially unsustainable. Since their welfare system is going to implode the Dutch are trying to lengthen its life by shortening people's lives.
And the Europeans still have the chutzpah of accusing the Americans of being unethical people whose supreme value is money.
Consider that both murder and assistance to suicide is illegal in the Netherlands. "Euthanasia" is a legal way out for physicians in cases of incurable, prolonged suffering. Medical patients within that category aren't new; these people can now be dealt with in the open as a doctor does not have to fear criminal prosecution.
Before you condemn this practice ask yourself how many people are allowed to leave life thanks to a prescripted morphine overdose or withholding liquids in your country, without anyone knowing about it.
Euthanasia legislation was introduced in the Netherlands because of doctors getting crushed between improved medicine, selfaware patients and the concept of quality-of-life. These days people are getting older than ever and we've all watched the end of cancer, aids or Alzheimer's disease. We've accepted that people want to have a say in their destiny and we've accepted that doctors are looked at when death would be welcomed, rather than prolonging agony.
Euthanasia legislation is primarily to protect and guide doctors, it does not give the Dutch the right to die whenever they fancy.
Euthanasia is an answer to a public question. We did not raise this question lightly and we're fully aware of the historical and ethical difficulties. The subject is being evaluated constantly which enables doctors to change their opinion or procedures when new medication becomes available. The fairly recent improvements in palliative (pain avoiding) medicine have showed a decline in euthanasia cases.
I doubt whether this all actually saves money but that would be welcomed in the Netherlands aswell.