The Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) is advocating common place ailments aslegitimate grounds for voluntary suicide.
The KNMG no longer sees euthanasia as limited to just terminal illnesses, but is now including a vast range of psychosocial ailments including: “loneliness”, “loss of autonomy”, “disorders affecting vision”, “hearing and mobility”, “falls”, “confinement to bed”, “fatigue”, and “exhaustion and loss of fitness”.
The report continues to list other common hardships such as lack of social skills and financial resources as deficiencies that amount to unbearable suffering.
Responding to the report, Lord Nicholas Windsor, Chairman of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, stated:
“Euthanasia is already an established evil, but by including these conditions as justification to end a person’s life, the KNMG is opening it up to a whole new level of abuse. Blind to the true meaning of suffering, the KNMG is attempting to widen access to euthanasia to something little different from suicide. Such a move could provide a tragic precedent in Europe.”
Lord Alton of Liverpool, Chairman of the British Parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Human Dignity, said:
“Any talk of safeguards is rendered irrelevant when such an all-encompassing range of societal difficulties can be used to warrant the ending of a human life. One only has to consider the utter uselessness of the so-called safeguards which, we were assured at the time, were supposed to limit abortion to the most necessary of occasions. I question the motives of such a move. This is not so much the slippery slope but the edge of a precipice looking over the abyss.”
