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Minor Euthanized in Belgium, and It’s Legal

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A Belgian MD filled a syringe with heart-stopping poison, and injected the fluid into the arm of a dying minor who requested it. And it was all legal.

A Belgian newspaper says the patient was Dutch. Another report says the ill minor was 17. I am not sure why a Dutch teenager was euthanized in Belgium, since he could have been legally euthanized at home from age 12 and up.

BioEdge editor Michael Cook wrote a sober editorial about the ethics-shattering event:

Ultimately this is a triumph for out-and-out nihilism, not just Belgium’s inventive euthanasia lobby. Nihilism is a philosophical fad which seems to catching on. Below we feature a report on three American bioethicists who argue the case for population control to fight climate change and a defense of infanticide by a Finnish bioethicist.

I’ve also just discovered a new book by South African philosopher David Benatar. In it he argues that procreation is morally wrong because life’s a bitch and then you die (I am oversimplifying, of course). He concludes his book with these cheerful thoughts:

“Every birth is a future death. Between the birth and the death there is bound to be plenty of unpleasantness … Inflicting serious harm — or even the risk of it — on one person, without his or her consent, in order to benefit others, is presumptively wrong.”

If I’m right, euthanizing a child is not a terminus for Belgian euthanasia, but just a bus stop en route to pure nihilism. What its supporters are trying to eliminate is not just pain, but life itself.

Indeed, as Yuval Levin has noted, eliminating suffering has become the overriding purpose of society. Given that, eliminating ever-expanding categories of sufferers most follow.

It won’t take long before Belgium allows euthanasia of the disabled, chronically sick, and depressed, and mentally ill children, as it now does adults.

Photo: Brussels, Belgium, by By Jean-Pol Grandmont (Own work) [GFDL or CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.

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