euthanasia

An estimated 0.18 percent of all people over the age of 55 in the Netherlands want to end their lives. That amounts to just over 10 thousand people, according to a committee that researched euthanasia after a full life at the request of the government. More than a third of the older people who don't want to live anymore would like help with ending their lives, the researchers found, NOS reports.

Netherlands residents in their 20s and 30s are more conservative when it comes to issues like abortion and euthanasia than the generations before them, according to researchers at Tilburg University. That breaks the Netherlands' trend of becoming more and more progressive, the researchers conclude, AD reports.

The court in The Hague acquitted a nursing home doctor of patient's murder. The now-retired doctor was careful and followed the euthanasia protocol established in Dutch law when she performed euthanasia on a woman in the advanced stages of dementia, the court said in a statement.

Early next year coalition party D66 will submit a legislative proposal to make assisted suicide possible at the end of a "full" and "completed" life, parliamentarian Pia Dijkstra said in an interview with newspaper AD. The bill is a sensitive topic for Christian parties and coalition partners CDA and ChristenUnie, according to the newspaper.

A number of international news outlets reported the death of Dutch teen author Noa Pothoven as "legal euthanasia", though this apparently was not the case. The teenager died in a hospital bed in the living room of her parental home in Arnhem on Sunday, according to newspaper AD. In a final Instagram post the day before her death, she reported that she had stopped eating or drinking some days ago.

She slipped into a coma and passed away. "After years of fighting it is over", she wrote on the social media platform. "After many conversations and assessments it was decided that I will be released because my suffering is unbearable. It's over. I've not been really living for so long, I survive, and not even really that. I breath but no longer live."

Authorities in the Netherlands will pursue a criminal case against a doctor accused of performing euthanasia on a 74-year-old incapacitated woman with dementia. Her prosecution will be the country's first against a doctor involving euthanasia since the Dutch law permitting the practice went into law over 15 years ago.

Rahiied A. is the 21-year-old Rotterdam man arrested last week on suspicion of murdering an elderly woman in a nursing home in Puttershoek, and attempting to murder two other elderly women in Puttershoek and Rotterdam, by giving them insulin without medical necessity, newspaper AD reports. People who know A. describe him as a "family person" and an "ambitious boy". 

Residents of nursing home Huys te Hoecke in Puttershoek, municipality Binnenmaas, were horrified by the news that an employee of the nursing home was arrested for murdering one of their neighbors. "It is really bizarre. This could have happened to one of us", a 75-year-old resident said to newspaper AD.

The End Of Life clinic needs to hire at least 50 more doctors in order to keep up with the increasing number of applications for euthanasia, a spokesperson said to RTL Nieuws. The clinic already employs 59 doctors, so their doctors need to almost double. "We want to avoid waiting lists and people in need unnecessarily having to wait", the spokesperson said.

The four parties negotiating forming a new Dutch government together reached a compromise on medical ethics issues, AD reports based on a draft text for the government agreement. It says that the government will not make any proposals to expand the euthanasia law to allow assisted suicide for elderly people at the end of a full life, but will make more stem cell research possible, according to the newspaper. 

It seems that Christian party SGP is extending its fight against extending the Dutch euthanasia law to the outside world. SGP leader Kees van der Staaij published an opinion piece in American newspaper The Wall Street Journal under the headline: "In the Netherlands, the doctor will kill you".

"Is the day coming that it will be normal for old people to take a pill and simply disappear?" Van der Staaij wrote, according to the Volkskrant. According to him, the Netherlands is on a slippery slope.