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10/11/2004: "Professionalizing death for children"
The Netherlands continues its fast trip down the slippery slope:
Four times in recent months, Dutch doctors have pumped lethal doses of drugs into newborns they believe are terminally ill, setting off a new phase in a growing European debate over when, if ever, it's acceptable to hasten death for the critically ill.
Few details of the four newborns' deaths have been made public. Official investigations have found that the doctors made appropriate and professional decisions under an experimental policy allowing child euthanasia that's known as the Groningen University Hospital protocol.
"Applying euthanasia to children is another step down the slope in this debate," said Henk Jochemsen, the director of Holland's Lindeboom Institute, which studies medical ethics. "Not everybody agrees, obviously, but when we broaden the application from those who actively and repeatedly seek to end their lives to those for whom someone else determines death is a better option, we are treading in dangerous territory."
Great Britain is considering legalizing assisted suicide for the terminally ill, amid reports that doctors already may be helping thousands of patients to die each year.
"Assisted dying is a fact," said Hazel Biggs, the director of medical law at the University of Kent, who's about to publish a report estimating the number of assisted deaths in Britain at 18,000 annually. "We have to regulate it, to ensure that vulnerable people are being protected."
The problem with regulation, of course, is that once you've admitted the legitimacy of the act, it's a small step to start expanding it. That precisely what has happened in the Netherlands, where what started out as a way for people to ask for help in dying when suffering from painful terminal illnesses quickly moved to killing the non-terminal elderly, then to doing so without their permission, and now on to children.
Under the Groningen protocol, if doctors at the hospital think a child is suffering unbearably from a terminal condition, they have the authority to end the child's life. The protocol is likely to be used primarily for newborns, but it covers any child up to age 12.
A parent's role is limited under the protocol. While experts and critics familiar with the policy said a parent's wishes to let a child live or die naturally most likely would be considered, they note that the decision must be professional, so rests with doctors.
Because parents can't be expected to do what's in the best interests of their children, professionals who can look at things dispassionately must step in and Do What Needs to Be Done. Doctors, after all, are trained to deal with this Life and Death stuff, whereas the rest of us are just amateurs who will let irrelevancies like love for one's children or right and wrong get in the way of Doing What Needs to Be Done. You can understand why the Dutch want parents to have no more than an advisory role (which will be eliminated as soon as possible, so as not to have them gum up the works and try to prevent the professionals from Doing What Needs to Be Done) in whether their children will be allowed to suck up the scarce medical resources of their society. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, as Mr. Spock might say.
So, who's next? The insane? Criminals? The depressed? (Oops, already taking care of them.)
