An illustration of a case presented to me as requiring euthanasia without consent involved a Dutch nun who was dying painfully of cancer. Her physician felt her religion prevented her from agreeing to euthanasia so he felt both justified and compassionate in ending her life without telling her he was doing so. Practicing assisted suicide and euthanasia appears to encourage physicians to think they know best who should live and who should die, an attitude that leads them to make such decisions without consulting patients--a practice that has no legal sanction in the Netherlands or anywhere else.
Compassion is not always involved. In one documented case, a patient with disseminated breast cancer who had rejected the possibility of euthanasia had her life ended because, in the physician's words: "It could have taken another week before she died. I just needed this bed."
Since the government-sanctioned Dutch studies are primarily numerical and categorical, they do not examine the interaction of physicians, patients and families that determines the decision for euthanasia. Other studies conducted in the Netherlands have indicated how voluntariness is compromised, alternatives not presented and the criterion of unrelievable suffering bypassed. A few examples help to illustrate how this occurs:
A wife, who no longer wished to care for her sick, elderly husband, gave him a choice between euthanasia and admission to a home for the chronically ill. The man, afraid of being left to the mercy of strangers in an unfamiliar place, chose to have his life ended; the doctor although aware of the coercion, ended the man's life.
A healthy 50-year-old woman, who lost her son recently to cancer, refused treatment for her depression and said she would accept only help in dying. Her psychiatrist assisted in her suicide within four months of her son's death. He told me he had seen her for a number of sessions when she told him that if he did not help her she would kill herself without him. At that point, he did. He seemed on the one hand to be succumbing to emotional blackmail and on the other to be ignoring the fact that even without treatment, experience has shown that time alone was likely to have affected her wish to die.
Another Dutch physician, who was filmed ending the life of a patient recently diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, says of the patient, "I can give him the finest wheelchair there is, but in the end it is only a stopgap. He is going to die, and he knows it." That death may be years away but a physician with this attitude may not be able to present alternatives to this patient.
The government-sanctioned studies suggest an erosion of medical standards in the care of terminally ill patients in the Netherlands when 50% of Dutch cases of assisted suicide and euthanasia are not reported, more than 50% of Dutch doctors feel free to suggest euthanasia to their patients, and 25% admit to ending patients' lives without their consent.
Euthanasia, intended originally for the exceptional case, became an accepted way of dealing with serious or terminal illness in the Netherlands. In the process, palliative care became one of the casualties, while hospice care has lagged behind that of other countries. In testimony given before the British House of Lords, Zbigniew Zylicz, one of the few palliative care experts in the Netherlands, attributed Dutch deficiencies in palliative care to the easier alternative of euthanasia.
