Years ago the Netherlands legalized euthanasia of terminally-ill patients. The law makes it permissible for medical doctors to adminster lethal doses of certain drugs to the patients when the patient requests it. At first, the law was restricted in applicability to adult patient, then was expanded to include children.

Now babies may be killed by their doctors. Note well, not allowed to die on their own through withdrawal of life-sustaining care. but actually killed.

AMSTERDAM — The Netherlands is expanding its controversial euthanasia policy with guidelines on when doctors may end the lives of ill infants with the parents’ consent.

A draft of the new regulations will be presented to the Dutch parliament for debate in October. However the expansion of the policy will not require a change of the law, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health told news agency AP on Thursday.

The move follows controversial cases in which doctors ended the lives of terminally-ill children.

The change could also set a precedent for how doctors handle other cases in which patients are unable to give informed consent due to learning disability or dementia.

The Netherlands became the first nation to legalise euthanasia for adults under some conditions in 2001.

But doctors had been killing their patients for many years before 2001 without penalty by Dutch law. A woman named Hilly Boscher was killed by a psychiatrist in 1991 because she felt incapable of coping with the deaths of her two children, one from disease and one from suicide. He inetrviewed Ms. Boscher four time over five weeks and then “euthanized” her.

Rather than punish the psychiatrist for facilitating the death instead of trying to save the life of his suicidal patient, the Dutch Supreme Court essentially applauded his actions, ruling that there is no difference between physical and emotional suffering when justifying euthanasia.

As Wesley Smith pointed out in 2003,

supposedly ironclad protections against abuse — such as the doctrine of force mejeur and the stipulation that patient give multiple requests for euthanasia — quickly ceased meaningfully to constrain mercy killing. As a consequence, Dutch doctors now legally kill terminally ill people who ask for it, chronically ill people who ask for it, disabled people who ask for it, and depressed people who ask for it.

But killing babies is no new thing. Today’s news just makes formal what has been going on for many years.

According to a 1997 study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, approximately 8 percent of all Dutch infant deaths result from lethal injections. The babies deemed killable are often disabled and thus are thought not to have a “livable life.” The practice has become so common that 45 percent of neonatologists and 31 percent of pediatricians who responded to Lancet surveys had killed babies.

The summary of the study on The Lancet’s site says,

In the death-certificate study, 57% of all deaths had been preceded by a decision [by the parents and doctor] to forgo life-sustaining treatment; this decision was accompanied by the administration of potentially life-shortening drugs to alleviate pain or other symptoms in 23%, and by the administration of drugs with the explicit aim of hastening death in 8%. A drug was given explicitly to hasten death to neonates not dependent on life-sustaining treatment in 1% of all death cases. No chance of survival was the main motive in 76% of all end-of-life decisions, and a poor prognosis was the main motive in 18%. The interview study showed that parents had been involved in making 79% of decisions. The physicians consulted colleagues about 88% of decisions. Most paediatricians favoured formal review of medical decisions by colleagues together with ethical or legal experts.

The slippery slope is well greased.

Relatedly, Oregon’s law permitting physician-assisted suicide is now before the Supreme Court.