Dutch law gives the doctor the final decision to allow euthanasia. Doctors risk legal action, and every euthanasia case is reviewed to ensure the doctor in charge had kept to the legislated requirements.
Riet was shocked and distressed when her wish was refused. Her doctors’ consensus was they were not yet convinced she was making a consistent and rational decision.
Rob de Graaf was her specialist at Valkenhof hospital, where three doctors have performed seven voluntary euthanasias over the past five years.
De Graaf, who says he has had nightmares after performing euthanasias, volunteers to assist those eligible for euthanasia to relieve suffering. “Every doctor knows this is a cry for help,” he says. “The loss of human dignity is the major reason to ask for euthanasia.”
In Riet’s case, de Graaf said, doctors were unsure about her mental competency. Could she make a rational, consistent decision to end her life, or was the tumour affecting her mental state? She had to convince the doctors to help her end her life before the tumour took over and she lost her capacity to choose.
We have a man here, a “Dr. de Graaf”, who uses dreams to determine whether or not he should kill people.
How is it that actively killing someone is perserving their dignity? Why is death undignified?
If this life is all there is and the only gods are the ones we create, death has no dignity – it is a terror and better to confront the terror senseless and drugged than greet it as the door to the life of Revelation 21. Euthanasia, like abortion, also reinforces the delusion that humans are actually the lords of life. Euthanasia, we should admit, makes life easier for the survivors – they can pretend they will live forever, and they won’t have the burden of caring for another human being.
For a frightening and terribly accurate description of what we have become in the 21st century, I recommend Wisdom 1.12-2.24 (found, sadly, only in Bibles with the Apocryphra).
WHY is it necessary to saddle physicians with bumping off the inconvenient? Why can’t the State, if it wishes to be relieved of the expenses of the fragile old, simply set up mortuaries. After all the state manages to bump off criminals without medical window dressing why drag docs into it, other than to provide window dressing.
I am not surprised that Dr. de Graaf often has nightmares about euthanasia.
I dread the day that “evidence based medicine” forces physicians in the US into this trap also. (It is coming).
I read the following: de Graaf told Riet the criteria required for euthanasia were present. Her request was voluntary, and made understanding her prospects. Her suffering was “lasting and unbearable”. Her illness was terminal, inoperable and would lead to pain and incapacity before inevitable death.
“Pain and other physical discomfort is not evident,” the doctor told us. “Your mother’s suffering is based on the tarnish she feels with the loss of emotional self-control, dependency on others and loss of decorum. Her loss of human dignity is the reason we will agree to her euthanasia.” So the suffering was not unbearable physical pain but a psychological state. I am shocked. How much longer before depressives start asking for the same thing at the hands of the state. Surely they too have ‘loss of emotional self-control’ etc. It is a reminder to us all of how what starts off seeming to be a plausible argument for euthanasia (eg terrible physical pain) slides into many other excuses to pull the plug. Before long people even feel obliged to die, to spare others their distress etc. What a sad business. And no wonder the Netherlands today is such a spiritual desert. Or is it the other way round? The people of the Netherlands today, for so long so very progressive and endlessly liberal, have created a winter wonderland.
Doctors are supposed to SAVE lives….not TAKE them, or have they forgotten the oath they took upon becoming doctors?