A recent independent study by British researchers of Dutch euthanasia data has found that people with autism and intellectual disabilities have been legally euthanized in the Netherlands, even though they had no physical disease or ailment.
Euthanasia has been legal in the Netherlands since 2002 and the use of the practice has steadily expanded in the last two decades.
According to the Dutch government’s euthanasia review committee, 60,000 people were killed by their doctors between 2012 and 2021. The committee publicly released documents related to more than 900 of those cases to demonstrate how the law was working.
Irene Tuffrey-Wijne, a palliative care specialist at Britain’s Kingston University, and her colleagues reviewed the documents and published their findings in the journal BJPsych Open in May.
They found that among the 900 cases made available publicly, in 39 of them a person with an autistic and/or intellectual disability was euthanized. In this group, a minority of those killed by their doctors were elderly, but 18 of them were younger than 50. Of those, eight were younger than 30.
Almost all of those who requested to be killed–thirty out of 39–cited loneliness as one of the causes of their unbearable pain. Most of the patients cited a combination of mental problems, physical suffering, and diseases or aging-related difficulties as their reasons for requesting euthanasia, but eight said the only causes of their suffering were emotional and social factors related to their intellectual disability or autism–social isolation, a lack of coping strategies, or an inability to adjust their thinking.
“There’s no doubt in my mind these people were suffering,” Tuffrey-Wijne told the AP. “But is society really OK with sending this message, that there’s no other way to help them and it’s just better to be dead?”
Kasper Raus, an ethicist and public health professor at Belgium’s Ghent University, noted how drastically the debate on euthanasia has changed, as well as the type of patients requesting to be killed. Before euthanasia was legalized, he said, the debate was about people with cancer, not people with autism.
Some experts evaluate the change as a move from ‘mercy killings’ to eugenics.
Canada, which already has one of the world’s most permissive euthanasia laws, is set to explicitly allow euthanasia on the basis of mental illness alone next year.
“Helping people with autism and intellectual disabilities to die is essentially eugenics,” Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia told the AP.
In 2021, Canada expanded its 2016 euthanasia law from allowing the killing of people with a foreseeable death due to terminable illness to those with chronic conditions and disabilities. The law also explicitly allows for euthanasia due to mental illness alone starting in 2024.
This aspect was delayed to allow time to draw up parameters for such requests for euthanasia to be fulfilled. Opponents of the measure are sounding the alarm bells, as euthanasia has grown 30% already.
A new Health Canada report, which was published in October, found that under the more liberal law, the practice of euthanasia jumped 30% from 2021 to 2022 alone. Additionally, the report found that 3.5% of people euthanized did not have a terminal diagnosis.
Dr. Sonu Gaind, psychiatrist-in-chief at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, told CBS News that although the percentage is small, the most disturbing aspect of the report is its dismissal of the significance of these deaths by euthanasia.
“The proportion of MAID [Medical Assistance in Dying] recipients whose natural death was not reasonably foreseeable continues to remain very small compared to the total number of MAID recipients,” the report states.
Gaind said this “completely minimizes the numbers.”
She also criticized the report for its lack of data related to equity and diversity or marginalized populations. According to the report, that information will be included in the 2024 report.
“They’re saying that won’t be recorded until next year’s report,” Gaind said. “And yet, we’re still going ahead with further expansion.”
