Euthanasia Threatens to Spread in Europe

By Jenny Nolan, NRLC Dept. of Medical Ethics

When the Netherlands passed a law last April formalizing its euthanasia regulations, anxious eyes scanned the rest of Europe, fearing that other countries might follow the Dutch lead. Recent developments in England and Belgium have proven that concern was warranted.

Government bodies in both countries are involved in processes that may well conclude by legalizing euthanasia.

Diane Pretty is a 42-year-old, terminally ill woman living in England who wants to ensure that her husband will not be prosecuted if he helps her take her own life. When the director of public prosecution refused any such immunity, Mrs. Pretty argued and lost in the high court October 18.

But on November 1, The Guardian newspaper of London reported that a three-member committee of the House of Lords had agreed to bring Mrs. Pretty's case on appeal before the full House of Lords.

Lord Bingham, one of the three members, told The Guardian, "We are conscious of the fact it raises issues with which the courts in this country have not had a previous occasion to deal."

Mrs. Pretty has argued that England's blanket ban on assisted suicide denies her the right to die with dignity and is in violation of the European convention on human rights. The article did not disclose when the House of Lords will reach a decision on the matter, but the agreement to consider her appeal came just one week after a major push toward euthanasia in Belgium.

On Thursday, October 25 the Belgian Senate voted by a margin of 44 to 23 to pass a bill that would legalize euthanasia. Sources differ in predicting when the Belgian chamber of deputies will take up the legislation. Some say it will pass by year's end while others believe it will happen in 2002. Either way the consensus seems to be that passage in the lower house is a foregone conclusion.

In April 2000, NRL News reported that the Belgian Socialist Party was driving the euthanasia agenda with the cooperation of the Ecolo (Green) and Liberal Parties. Senator Clothilde Nyssens, a member of the Social Christian Party, has been an outspoken critic and leader of the opposition.

"The text goes too far," Nyssens told The Guardian the day after the Senate's approval. "We know lots of doctors who don't like this law; who are afraid it gives them too much freedom."

According The Guardian, the bill requires patients requesting euthanasia to be at least 18 years old, terminally ill, in constant suffering, and of sound mind. After voluntary requests have been repeated and put into writing, at least a month must elapse before doctors would be authorized to inject lethal drugs into the patient.
Marcel Colla, a former health minister, said the Senate approval of the euthanasia bill was "a sign of a society which is becoming more mature."

However, according to The Guardian, studies in Belgium have already shown one in 10 deaths among the country's 10 million people are the result of "informal" euthanasia, whereby doctors quietly kill their patients in violation of current law. One particular study, published last year in the British medical journal The Lancet, found more than 3 in every 100 patients who had not requested euthanasia were killed.

"It is grievous to see Belgium proceeding with a pro-euthanasia bill even when faced with evidence that some doctors clearly have no regard for the rule of law, let alone the wishes of their patients," said David N. O'Steen, Ph.D., executive director of the National Right to Life Committee. "Legalizing their actions doesn't make a single substantive improvement in positive, end-of-life care, which is what these people need the most."