By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist

A prominent right-to-die group in the Netherlands wants to set up a suicide clinic to be used by all those people who wish to die but do not meet government requirements for assisted suicide.

According to Radio Netherlands, Right to Die NL (NVVE) wants to set up “life’s end” clinics to accommodate  people who do not meet the government’s legal requirements for euthanasia. These people include those suffering from chronic psychiatric problems, Alzheimer’s or dementia, or who feel they have “completed” their life. 

This is just the latest expansion in the Dutch euthanasia program which is already considered to be one of the most liberal in the world.

Wesley J. Smith, attorney and anti-euthanasia advocate, cites several recent examples of ways in which the Dutch program may soon expand to accommodate those patients who don’t qualify for assisted suicide under the current law.

For instance, Dutch doctors have created a how-to-commit-suicide informational brochure for patients who don’t qualify for physician assisted suicide that will enable them commit “autoeuthanasia.”

Another idea came from a group of more than 100,000 people who signed a petition asking the Dutch parliament to allow euthanasia for the healthy elderly who are tired of life.

“There is no denying the evidence that euthanasia consciousness leads to a broader culture of death that eventually accepts all comers,” Smith writes on his blog, Second Hand Smoke. 

“Perhaps they are trying to catch up with Switzerland’s suicide clinics.  Regardless, their logic is impecable. Once killing is considered an acceptable answer to human suffering, nihilism is unleashed and the ‘what’ that causes ‘suffering’ ceases to matter. Culture of death? What culture of death?”

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