A Dutch review committee has now ruled that the country’s first euthanasia of a child under 12 was handled with “due care.”
The child, nearly two, had been born at 26 weeks’ gestation. He had severe brain damage, cerebral palsy, seizures, and a developmental age of about six weeks. Although the child was not dying, doctors and parents chose to sedate and kill him, as LifeSiteNews first covered in June.
Now, the Review Committee’s full report has been released. It argues that the child “had multiple, very severe disabilities, both mental and physical, and the prognosis was that the child would be dependent on support with all activities of daily living for the rest of their life,” with a “very high probability of the child dying at a very young age due to complications.”
“In the course of the child’s short life, there was a complete lack of development or improvement,” the report claims, with parents and physicians “convinced that the child was suffering unbearably and without prospect of improvement.” The child’s attending multidisciplinary team concurred, as did a mandatory second opinion.
However, not every second opinion consulted concurred in all respects. One group of second-opinion doctors agreed “there was no real chance of improving the situation and that there was an irreversible situation,” but not “that there was no continuous unbearable suffering at that time,” and therefore “reasonable other solutions existed, such as palliative capabilities and drug alternatives that could potentially lead to better seizure control of the epilepsy.”
But parents ultimately ruled out palliative care, so the doctor “approached another doctor outside his own region (second second opinion) who concluded that the unbearable suffering in the child was clearly visible” and could only be ended in a “reasonable way” by “ending life.”
Ultimately, the report says, “given that the child was incapable of any form of communication, the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment options were discussed extensively with the parents. As more and more became clear on the basis of medical examinations and in view of the child’s visible clinical deterioration, the parents asked the physician to terminate the child’s life. The physician spoke extensively with the parents about the termination of life, and their position was consistent.”
This is not technically the end of the review; the Public Prosecution Service must still review the case and decide if the doctors complied with the law. But that agency is not expected to contradict the Review Committee.
The case is a grim milestone for euthanasia, which was legally extended to minors under 12 in 2024. At the time, Dutch Health Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Hugo de Jonge called it an “appropriate step to meet the identified need from practice and provide physicians with the desired legal protection.” The system had already progressed in recent years to killing autistic people and healthy young women with depression.
As Patients Rights Action Fund (PRAF) executive director Matt Vallière has argued, euthanasia programs in the United States constitute discrimination against the disabled when programs “will pay for every instance of assisted suicide” but not palliative care. “I don’t call that autonomy,” he says; “I call that eugenics.”
Live Action’s Bridget Sielicki further notes that “because a paralytic is involved, a person can look peaceful, while they actually drown to death in their own bodily secretions. Experimental assisted suicide drugs have led to the ‘burning of patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain.’ Furthermore, a study in the medical journal Anaesthesia found that a third of patients took up to 30 hours to die after ingesting assisted suicide drugs, while four percent took seven days to die.”