CWA Condemns Netherlands’ Euthanasia Policy as Remnant of Nazi Occupation     12/2/2004

Washington, D.C. - Concerned Women for America (CWA) responded to a November 30 Associated Press report that a hospital in the Netherlands, which is the first nation to permit euthanasia, has already begun killing terminally ill newborns by administering a lethal dose of sedatives.

The announcement by the Groningen Academic Hospital came amid a growing discussion in Holland on whether to legalize euthanasia on people incapable of deciding for themselves whether they want to end their lives.

“It is especially distressing to watch this once great country and people, who stood up to Nazi crimes against humanity, permit conduct for which Nazi doctors were hanged as war criminals,” said Jan LaRue, CWA’s chief counsel. “This is the land of Corrie Ten Boom and The Hiding Place where the Dutch Resistance protected innocent human life from Nazi barbarism.”

Experts in euthanasia and assisted suicide were not surprised by the news. The fact is that a 1997 study in the British medial journal, the Lancet, revealed that doctors in the Netherlands were killing approximately 8 percent of all infants who die each year. One-fifth of these killings were done without the consent of the parents. The study found that 45 percent of neonatologists and 31 percent of pediatricians who responded to questionnaires had killed infants.

Another study revealed that in 1990 an average of three people per day were actively killed by doctors without the patients’ knowledge or consent.

“The Netherlands’ slide into the bottom of this immoral abyss should set off alarms in every state against enacting a so-called Death with Dignity Act, such as Oregon has done,” LaRue concluded. “The Netherlands went from physician-assisted suicide to voluntary euthanasia to involuntary euthanasia of incapacitated adults and children in less than 30 years. And it was all done in the name of patient autonomy. Once the door is opened to what is appealingly but deceitfully labeled as the ‘good death,’ you realize too late that you’ve opened the door to Hell.”

For Information Contact:
Valerie Mosher
(202) 488-7000
media.cwfa.org

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