{"id":1617,"date":"2004-12-21T20:12:15","date_gmt":"2004-12-21T19:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2004\/12\/21\/the_dutch_cesspit"},"modified":"2004-12-21T20:12:15","modified_gmt":"2004-12-21T19:12:15","slug":"the_dutch_cesspit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2004\/12\/21\/the_dutch_cesspit","title":{"rendered":"The Dutch cesspit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hearing of the Dutch bigots who are among the most vituperatively anti-Islamic in Europe does not have its full impact until you realise what they are fighting to protect. We’ve all heard of the tolerated red-light districts and liberal attitudes to marijuana, and its “enlightened”, “uninhibited” attitude to sexuality. What is less well-known is euthanasia.
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\nIt’s not the only country which tolerates this, or which (unlike the UK) does not prosecute people for assisting suicide. A few years ago I heard of a family whose son suffered brain damage during heart surgery, resulting in the loss of his sight and hearing. A TV programme showed him screaming constantly, going to sleep “out of exhaustion” after a few hours of this. The parents, meanwhile, searched high and low for a place where he could legally get euthanasia (my mother noted that the child was not very well stimulated). Their first port of call was the Netherlands, which refused.<\/p>\n

Today, however, babies with supposedly excruciating pain are being put to death at a rate of one a month in the country as a whole; this report<\/a> in the Guardian today claims that the doctors are seeking to have the practice regulated rather than prosecuting the people responsible:<\/p>\n

Euthanasia has been practised for 10 years in the Netherlands, the first country in the world to legalise the practice, and now accounts for 4-5,000 deaths a year, 3.5% of the national death rate.<\/p>\n

The practice is severely circumscribed and tightly regulated. It is estimated that doctors in the Netherlands, the only people allowed to perform euthanasia, turn down two-thirds of euthanasia requests.<\/p>\n

Euthanasia is legal from the age of 12. It cannot apply to children because they cannot take a free decision. But several moves are afoot to extend euthanasia beyond the current limits.<\/p>\n

… There is also a discussion about euthanasia for patients suffering from dementia, as well as about psychiatric and other cases involving patients unable to take a rational decision for themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The whole “living will” issue has recently been discussed here as well – people are known to change their minds once they are faced with a crippling condition and a choice between that or death. Why are they even thinking of euthanasing people with dementia, who by definition cannot make decisions for themselves – this is just plain murder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hearing of the Dutch bigots who are among the most vituperatively anti-Islamic in Europe does not have its full impact until you realise what they are fighting to protect. We’ve all heard of the...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-q5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}