[Dion]

Most troubling to Boer is the latest development in which the Dutch Right to Die Society, NVVE, has established a network of mobile euthanasia clinics, with the sole purpose of killing people who ask to die. “Doctors of the End of Life Clinic have only two options: administer life-ending drugs or send the patient away,” writes Boer.

In other words, don’t bother to seek anti-depressants or receive some grief counselling. It’s death or nothing. Nice. The new face of compassion.

Other longtime proponents of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are starting to speak out about the mobile death squad free-for-all in the Netherlands.

Boer says another reason for his conversion away from euthanasia is how it is affecting doctors.'

“Whereas the law sees assisted suicide and euthanasia as an exception, public opinion is shifting toward considering them rights, with corresponding duties on doctors to act,” writes Boer.

Dr. Boudewijn Chabot, a Dutch psychiatrist, has been quoted as saying on the Dutch TV program Nieuwsuur that the law “has gone off the rails.”
This from the very man who was convicted in 1991 for killing a healthy, sane 50-year-old woman who was depressed because one of her sons committed suicide, another died from illness and her husband left her.

Most parents would acknowledge that losing a child constitutes unbearable suffering and would lead to depression, but this woman needed counselling and compassion, not a lethal injection.

Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, says Quebec’s Bill 52 would force that province’s doctors to refer patients who wanted to be killed to their superior despite their objection on moral or professional grounds.

In his column, Boer wonders if the law either wasn’t properly crafted in Holland, or whether “the mere existence of such a law is an invitation to see assisted suicide and euthanasia as a normality instead of a last resort?”

Schadenberg believes it’s the latter. So do I.

“Once the genie is out of the bottle,” concludes Boer, “it is not likely to ever go back in again.”

http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion...027/story.html