A new study sheds new light on euthanasia in the Netherlands, the first country to legalize it for terminally ill people, finding that nearly one in eight adult patients who requested mercy killings decided not to go through with it. Nearly half of the euthanasia requests were carried out.
The study comes at a time of heightened scrutiny of euthanasia -- especially in the Netherlands, where officials acknowledged last year that they had carried out mercy killings of terminally ill newborns.
Belgium has since enacted a euthanasia law similar to the Netherlands. In the US, Oregon is alone in allowing physician-assisted suicide, but its law is expected to be argued before the US Supreme Court this fall.
broad survey
The study, appearing in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine, consists of a survey completed by 3,614 Dutch general practitioners who were asked to describe requests for euthanasia they received during the previous year.
While more than half the doctors had not received a request, almost 20 percent received more than one. Of those 2,658 requests, 44 percent resulted in euthanasia. In 13 percent of the cases, the request was granted but the patient died before the act; in another 13 percent the patient died before the decision-making process was completed. In 12 percent, the physician refused the request. In another 13 percent, patients changed their minds. In the remaining cases, the decision was still ongoing at the time of the survey, or the doctor did not detail the reason euthanasia was not performed.
not medical
Project leader Bregje Onwuteaka-Philipsen said she was surprised that "the most important reasons for doing the request are not strictly medical." The survey asked physicians the reasons that patients in their most recent euthanasia case sought help in ending their own lives, with the most frequent being pointless suffering, loss of dignity and weakness.
In cases in which doctors denied the requests, the most common reasons were not wanting to be a burden on their family, tired of living and depression.
The 13 percent of patients who decided ultimately not to pursue euthanasia demonstrates "it is really very important to keep asking the patient [until the moment of the actual administration] whether this is what he or she wants," Onwuteaka-Philipsen wrote in an e-mail.
newborn euthanizing
The study does not mention the proposed guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns designed by officials at Groningen Academic Hospital. In November, officials there revealed they had already begun carrying out such procedures, euthanizing four severely ill newborns in 2003.
A Dutch government proposal on guidelines involving infants is expected to be released this fall.
The Netherlands has a long history on the issue, where for decades euthanasia was outlawed but widely practiced and rarely prosecuted.
Under a law that took effect in 2002, euthanasia is restricted to terminal patients suffering unbearable pain with no hope of improvement, and who request to die when they are of sound mind. Each case is reviewed by a panel of medical experts.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS