In 1984, Holland legalized euthanasia. Critics immediately objected that Dutch doctors, having been given the right to kill their elderly patients at their request, would almost at once find reasons to kill patients at their whim. This is precisely what has happened. The Journal of Medical Ethics, in reviewing Dutch hospital practices, reported that 3 percent of Dutch deaths for 1995 were assisted suicides, and that of these, fully one-fourth were involuntary. The doctors simply knocked their patients off, no doubt assuring the family that Grootmoeder would have wanted it that way. As a result, a great many elderly Dutch carry around sanctuary certificates indicating in no uncertain terms that they do not wish their doctors to assist them to die, emerging from their coma, when they are ill, just long enough to tell these murderous pests for heaven’s sake to go away. The authors of the study, Henk Jochensen and John Keown, reported with some understatement that “Dutch claims of effective regulation ring hollow.” Euthanasia, as Dr. Peggy Norris observed with some asperity, “cannot be controlled.”
..... [So] if it cannot be controlled, just what is irrational about religious objections to social policies that when they reach the bottom of the slippery slope are bound to embody something Dutch, degraded, and disgusting?
How many scientific atheists, I wonder, propose to spend their old age in Holland?
[The Devils Delusion page 32]
