Dutch government panel rules euthanasia doctor ‘acted in good faith’ when he murdered woman with dementia
A Dutch doctor who euthanized an elderly woman with dementia “acted in good faith,” according to an euthanasia oversight panel, preventing the doctor from being prosecuted.
This particular case was sent to the Regional Review Committee, which oversees the country’s radical euthanasia regime.
The woman, who was over 80, had dementia. She had allegedly earlier requested to be euthanized when “the time was right” but in her last days expressed her desire to continue living. This doctor put a sedative in the patient’s coffee and then enlisted the help of family members to hold the struggling, objecting patient down so that she could administer the lethal injection.
Photo/Nodar Kherkheulidze via wikimedia commons
Just want to emphasis that the woman was struggling so much that she had to be restrained.
“I am convinced that the doctor acted in good faith, and we would like to see more clarity on how such cases are handled in the future,” Committee Chairman Jacob Kohnstamm said. Taking the case to court would be “not to punish the doctor, who acted in good faith and did what she had to do, but to get judicial clarity over what powers a doctor has when it comes to the euthanasia of patients suffering from severe dementia
Society has “flipped everything completely upside down,” Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told Life Site News. “This is a prime example of another upside down attitude in the culture.”
“Doesn’t someone have a right to change their mind?” he asked. “They sell it as choice and autonomy, but here’s a woman who’s saying, ‘no, I don’t want it,’ and they stick it in her coffee, they hold her down and lethally inject her.”
“It’s false compassion,” Schadenberg continued. “It’s killing people basically out of a false ideology” that treats euthanasia as somehow good when “it’s the exact opposite of what it actually is.”
“All signs say she didn’t want to die,” he said. “Canadians should take notice of this because this is exactly what we’re debating in Canada.”
A current debate in Canada is, “should they expand euthanasia to people who ask for it in their power of attorney…so if they’re incompetent, they can have euthanasia anyway,” Schadenberg explained.
photo Wim Vandenbussche via Flickr
