What happened in the Netherlands?
The longest experience we have with assisted suicide is in the Netherlands, or Holland, where active euthanasia as well as assisted suicide have been legally tolerated for more than 25 years.
The Netherlands has become a frightening laboratory experiment because assisted suicide and euthanasia have grown from a rare occurrence to standard practice that claims thousands of lives each year. At the same time, improvements in pain management and palliative care have slowed.
"Pressure for improved palliative care appears to have evaporated," according to Herbert Hendin, M.D. Dr. Hendin is a Director of Suicide Prevention International and was formerly the Medical Director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
"Over the past two decades," Hendin continued, "the Netherlands has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia for the terminally ill to euthanasia for the chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for psychological distress and from voluntary euthanasia to nonvoluntary and involuntary euthanasia.
"Once the Dutch accepted assisted suicide it was not possible legally or morally to deny more active medical (assistance to die), i.e. euthanasia, to those who could not effect their own deaths. Nor could they deny assisted suicide or euthanasia to the chronically ill who have longer to suffer than the terminally ill or to those who have psychological pain not associated with physical disease. To do so would be a form of discrimination.
Involuntary euthanasia has been justified as necessitated by the need to make decisions for patients not [medically] competent to choose for themselves."
Research shows that, for one thousand people a year in the Netherlands, physicians have ended their patients' lives without any request from or consultation with the patients.