Shock: Infant Euthanasia Has Been Legal Here for Two Years

I’m shocked. I live in the Netherlands, I am pro-life, and yet I was not aware of this until now: infant euthanasia was legalized here in 2006! It doesn’t make a real difference in a sense, in that the so-called Groningen protocol – by which children under age twelve years with severe disabilities can be euthanaized with parental consent -, had already been officially tolerated (a procedure by which the doctor’s murder charges will be dropped by the prosecutor) since 2004. In fact, the way I found out about the legality, is through a report that claims no infants have been euthanized in 2007 – which obviously isn’t saying that it really doesn’t happen, cause passive euthanasia is not counted.

However, what strikes me is that in other cases of crimes that are officially tolerated, like selling soft drugs at so-called “coffee shops”, there’s lots of media coverage whenever a politician calls for legalization. In fact, soft drug sales have been officially tolerated for thirty years, and politicians are still falling over each other in the debate over whether the practice should be legalized. Now I happen to support the legalization of soft drugs, so it feels nonsensical to me that politicians are still fighting over it after this long and the media is grossly overemphasizing the subject, but it really points out how careless our people are about disabled life, if infant euthanasia can be legalized with hardly any media coverage or political outcry two years after its officially being tolerated. Maybe the issue would’ve gotten more attention if the legalization attempt had been done in 2007, because the Christian Union, one of only two pro-life parties in the Netherlands, came onto the government then. It’s still a very small party, so unless the party had made it a “breaking point” during government agreement negotiations, the practice would still have been legalized. But then still, how can it be that the Dutch people are not notified through the mainstream media that euthanasia on children is about to be legalized. We are, unfortunately, not a pro-life country at all, so maybe the media don’t care about the ten or so children each year of whose euthanasia authorities are notified.