Where I stand—Mike O’Callaghan: Medicine made to kill

Friday, May 4, 2001 | 4:11 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I wrote a column about the Dutch government getting on the slippery slope to death. The act was completed this year when that country fully developed a culture of death. The Dutch parliament passed a law to completely decriminalize euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide. A law permits doctors to kill their patients. The Dutch have now gone down the slope and are immersed in a cesspool of death.

Hitler showed the Germans where this kind of action could take them, and it's a sad lesson modern Germany will never forget. They are shocked by the most recent Dutch law and have expressed disgust for the law. Roger Cohen, reporting from Berlin in the New York Times, writes:

"Referring to these practices in its criticism of the Dutch law, Die Welt, a daily, noted today that under Hitler: 'The government thugs that went into institutions for the handicapped to select who was unworthy for life were very careful not to broadcast their intentions. At some level, the old scruples linked to the commandment against killing were present.' It continued, 'The scandal in the Hague is that a Parliament has imposed a state norm in place of the freedom to uphold such scruples.' "

In 1994 Wesley J. Smith, a San Francisco lawyer, wrote an article in USA Today that also pointed out that the Dutch were headed down a slippery slope that would soon be a threat for seriously ill patients.

Smith wrote: "Beyond these concerns are worries about where legalization (of physician-assisted suicide) would take us in the future. You can bet that the killing won't be restricted to those on death's doorstep. (Half of Kevorkian's patients' were not terminally ill. One woman exhibited no evidence of physical illness at all.)

"Once the terminally ill can be hustled into death, others will soon be added to the list: the chronically ill, the mentally anguished, babies born with defects, and the elderly and disabled who ask for death during a bout of depression.

"Private acts have public consequences. With legalization, we will be well on the road to a death-on-demand society where the old, sick and disabled will be pressured to lead the way."

The Dutch have had a long record of using doctor administered death to handle "social problems." Richard Miniter writes in the Wall Street Journal, "Many old people now fear Dutch hospitals. More than 10 percent of senior citizens who responded to a recent survey, which did not mention euthanasia, volunteered that they feared being killed by their doctors without their consent. One senior-citizens group printed up wallet cards that tell doctors that the cardholder opposes euthanasia." As a senior citizen, I would want my travel agency to plan my European tour so it will be unnecessary to enter Holland.

Despite all of the civilized concern about the abuse of death-dealing doctors, the Dutch have insisted on going to the extremes. So what has encouraged this insistence? Miniter tells us, "The path to the death culture began when doctors learned to think like accountants. As the cost of socialized medicine in the Netherlands grew, doctors were lectured about the climbing cost of care; in many hospitals, signs were posted indicating how much old-age treatments cost taxpayers. The result was a growing 'social pressure' from doctors and others, says Arno Heltzel, a spokesman for the Catholic Union of the Elderly, the largest Dutch senior-citizen group, which favors voluntary euthanasia. 'Old people have to excuse themselves for living. When they say that all of their friends are dead, people say, "Maybe it is time for you to go, too" rather than "You need to f ind new friends." ' "

Then Miniter writes, "So professional restrictions against euthanasia have been progressively cast aside. The Hippocratic Oath has either been abandoned or rewritten. The Dutch Pediatric Society even issued guidelines for killing infants in 1993; the Royal Dutch Society of Pharmacology sends a book to all new doctors that includes formulas for euthanasia-inducing poisons."

In 1995 this column told Sun readers of the large number of government verified Dutch patients who were killed by doctors without their consent. That slippery slope traveled by the Dutch government and doctors has moved rapidly from curing patients to killing them. There are some restrictions in the new law. A child of 12 must have parental approval before being killed. When they are 16 the parents must be notified but their consent is unnecessary.

About the best description of Dutch society and its medicine is sick, sick, sick.