Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

The culture of death continues is rampage as news leaks of a 24 year-old healthy woman who will be euthanized this summer in Belgium simply because she felt like she wanted to die since she was a child.

Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition is reporting on the case of a woman named Laura who will be euthanized this summer for psychological reasons. The June 19 edition of DeMorgen states that Laura has good friends, loves coffee and theater, but that she has wanted to die ever since childhood.

The 24 year-old is quoted as saying, “Life, that’s not for me.”

Therefore, she has chosen to be free of her lifelong inner conflict, depression and self-destruction by euthanasia.

In Belgium, all that is required for euthanasia is an agreement from a doctor that the psychological pain a person is experiencing cannot be relieved in a way that the individual finds acceptable.

“That means, Laura may be treatable, but Laura has decided that the only acceptable ‘treatment’ is death,” Schadenberg reports.

Laura has been scheduled for euthanasia by lethal injection this summer even though she is an otherwise healthy 24 year-old.

As Schadenberg reports, the federal euthanasia commission in Belgium says that 50 to 60 deaths by euthanasia are performed on psychiatric patients each year.

Similar cases are occurring in the Netherlands where 42 deaths for psychiatric reasons and 97 euthanasia deaths for people with dementia occurred in 2013.

Thus far, physician assisted suicide is legal in the states of Oregon, Washington and Vermont. The highly publicized death of 29 year-old Brittany Maynard in November of 2014 caused a surge of renewed interest in passing assisted suicide laws. Thus far, only a proposed law in California has managed to make its way through the legislative process and is schedule to be debated by the full Assembly on June 23.
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