Wesley J. Smith

This is the inescapable logic of euthanasia: It is much more expensive to care for ill and disabled patients than “compassionately” kill them. As I like to say, it may take $1000 for assisted suicide but $100,000 to provide the care that helps the patient not want end to their lives.

above quote from Wesley J. Smith, Washington, D.C.


DNRs also save money if doctors can convince patients and families that the patient has no quality of life.  It has nothing to do with qualilty of life; it has everything to do with saving health money and spending it on those more worthy: the young, the beautiful, the well educated.  If you are a bum or if you are elderly you are not necessary. Most physicians only want good patients to administer to.

Most patients do not require big dollars care before they die, I remember reading a Canada estimate is $30,000.  

A DNR is you refusing treatment. If someone said to me to do you want a DNR or do you want to live six months longer, I would of course say I want to live six months longer. I want treatment.  DNRs are being pushed on people with pneumonias not only terminal cancer patients like how they were first intended.  Now if you do not have a DNR there is something wrong with you and you do not belong to our disposal society and you are the willing disposee.

Dutch Ethicist: “Assisted Suicide: Don’t Go There”

Theo Boer

This is the original article that was written for the British media.
The Daily Mail published this instead and EPC published this.

By Professor Theo Boer
Authorized version, July 16, 2014

In 2001 The Netherlands was the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia and, along with it, assisted suicide. Various safeguards were put in place to show who should qualify and doctors acting in accordance with these safeguards would not be prosecuted. Because each case is unique, five regional review committees were installed to assess every case and to decide whether it complied with the law. For five years after the law became effective, such physician-induced deaths remained level - and even fell in some years. In 2007 I wrote that ‘there doesn’t need to be a slippery slope when it comes to euthanasia. A good euthanasia law, in combination with the euthanasia review procedure, provides the warrants for a stable and relatively low number of euthanasia.’ Most of my colleagues drew the same conclusion.

But we were wrong - terribly wrong, in fact. In hindsight, the stabilization in the numbers was just a temporary pause. Beginning in 2008, the numbers of these deaths show an increase of 15% annually, year after year. The annual report of the committees for 2012 recorded 4,188 cases in 2012 (compared with 1,882 in 2002). 2013 saw a continuation of this trend and I expect the 6,000 line to be crossed this year or the next. Euthanasia is on the way to become a ‘default’ mode of dying for cancer patients.

Alongside this escalation other developments have taken place. Under the name ‘End of Life Clinic,’ the Dutch Right to Die Society NVVE founded a network of travelling euthanizing doctors. Whereas the law presupposes (but does not require) an established doctor-patient relationship, in which death might be the end of a period of treatment and interaction, doctors of the End of Life Clinic have only two options: administer life-ending drugs or sending the patient away. On average, these physicians see a patient three times before administering drugs to end their life. Hundreds of cases were conducted by the End of Life Clinic. The NVVE shows no signs of being satisfied even with these developments. They will not rest until a lethal pill is made available to anyone over 70 years who wishes to die. Some slopes truly are slippery.

Other developments include a shift in the type of patients who receive these treatments. Whereas in the first years after 2002 hardly any patients with psychiatric illnesses or dementia appear in reports, these numbers are now sharply on the rise. Cases have been reported in which a large part of the suffering of those given euthanasia or assisted suicide consisted in being aged, lonely or bereaved. Some of these patients could have lived for years or decades.
Whereas the law sees assisted suicide and euthanasia as an exception, public opinion is shifting towards considering them rights, with corresponding duties on doctors to act. A law that is now in the making obliges doctors who refuse to administer euthanasia to refer their patients to a ‘willing’ colleague. Pressure on doctors to conform to patients’ (or in some cases relatives’) wishes can be intense. Pressure from relatives, in combination with a patient’s concern for the wellbeing of his beloved, is in some cases an important factor behind a euthanasia request. Not even the Review Committees, despite hard and conscientious work, have been able to halt these developments.

I used to be a supporter of legislation. But now, with twelve years of experience, I take a different view. At the very least, wait for an honest and intellectually satisfying analysis of the reasons behind the explosive increase in the numbers. Is it because the law should have had better safeguards? Or is it because the mere existence of such a law is an invitation to see assisted suicide and euthanasia as a normality instead of a last resort? Before those questions are answered, don’t go there. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not likely to ever go back in again.

Theo Boer is a professor of ethics at the Protestant Theological University at Groningen. For nine years he has been a Member of a euthanasia Regional Review Committee. The Dutch Government has five such committees that assess whether a euthanasia case was conducted in accordance with the law. The views expressed here represent his views as a professional ethicist, and not of any institution.

Links to important articles:
• Netherlands 2012 euthanasia statistics. 

• Euthanasia: Incremental extensions are inevitable. 

• Dutch health minister: 45 psychiatric euthanasia deaths in 2013.

• The Netherlands euthanasia law has derailed.

• Blind woman dies by euthanasia in the Netherlands.
• Some Dutch pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions for euthanasia. 
• Mobile euthanasia deaths begins in the Netherlands.