The following post is from the National Right to Life News website.
Editor’s note. Dr. Saunders is a former general surgeon and is CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship, a UK-based organization with 4,500 UK doctors and 1,000 medical students as members.
Photo is of Dr. Eduard Verhagen
In this last week both Belgium and the Netherlands have taken major steps towards euthanasia for children.
What is new about this statement is that it says that the parents’ suffering may be a reason to kill the newborn.
A consensus among members of the Belgian Federal Parliament has reportedly formed in support of legislation to allow children to choose to undergo euthanasia in certain dire cases, according to a report in the Belgian daily newspaper Der Morgen, as translated by the Paris-based news agency Presseurop.
If child euthanasia is legalized in Belgium, the country would become the first in the developed world to have a law on the books formally allowing the practice.
Belgium became the second country in the world after the Netherlands to legalize euthanasia in 2002, but the statute currently extends only to people 18 or older.
The bill, introduced by the Socialist party last December, lays out guidelines for doctors to decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not a child is mature enough to make the decision to end his or her own life, as well as whether a child’s health is grave and hopeless enough to warrant euthanasia.
“The idea is to update the law to take better account of dramatic situations and extremely harrowing cases we must find a response to,” Socialist party leader Thierry Giet said shortly after the bill was introduced, according to Agence France-Presse.