Doctors Objected To One-Year-Old Being Euthanized In Netherlands

A brain damaged one-year-old was euthanized in the Netherlands even though doctors said “reasonable alternatives” existed for reducing the toddler’s suffering, a review has found.Nevertheless, the report by a Dutch government committee into the case concluded that the country’s first reported medically assisted death of a child was handled with “due care.”The child, whose name and gender are not public, was a month shy of their second birthday when they were euthanized at the end of 2025. The death marked the first use of a 2024 law that legalized euthanasia for children between one and 12 years old in The Netherlands. That law lays out strict requirements for medical assistance in dying, including a consensus that the child is experiencing “unbearable suffering without prospect of improvement.”According to the report, the child was born extremely prematurely, just 26 weeks into the mother’s pregnancy. Extensive brain damage led to a severe seizure disorder called infantile epileptic spasms syndrome. An MRI also showed brain damage linked to spastic cerebral palsy and cerebral visual impairment. Because of the damage, “the child’s developmental age was estimated to be that of a six-week-old baby,” according to the report.The child was also struggling to breathe and had an “unsafe swallow action,” leading doctors to believe complications were likely from food entering the child’s lungs. “There was deemed to be a very high probability of the child dying at a very young age due to complications,” the report stated. The committee went on to predict, “Every facet of ‘being human’ in terms of motor skills, behaviour and personality was severely affected, and there would be no improvement.”As the parents and medical team caring for the child moved towards euthanasia, the first set of doctors they approached for a second opinion — a requirement under the law — did not endorse the decision.The consulting physicians agreed there was “no realistic chance of improvement.” However, “Those physicians established that at that time the child was not continuously suffering unbearably.” The outside doctors concluded “that there were still reasonable alternatives, such as palliative options and other medications that could possibly result in better control of the epileptic seizures.”The doctor leading the child’s care told the committee that he had tried the regimen those doctors prescribed, which caused the child discomfort without alleviating their seizures. Further, epilepsy was not the only cause of the child’s suffering, according to the doctor. Another doctor consulted for a second opinion cited the child’s “highly frequent” seizures in finding that “the child’s unbearable suffering was clearly visible due to the continuous discomfort – except during sporadic better moments.”While the report omits any identifying details concerning the child, the family, or the medical team who carried out the euthanasia, it notes the lead doctor spoke “several times” with Physicians’ Support Centre for Paediatric End-of-Life Care.The center’s medical advisor, Dr. Eduard Verhagen, was the lead author of the “Groningen Protocol,” the procedural steps doctors in The Netherlands must follow before euthanizing infants, which became law in 2005. The country legalized medical assistance in dying for people over 12 years of age in 2002. In 2022, Dr. Verhagen asserted in a debate that surveys of doctors showed that in “around 5 percent” of infant deaths, “medication was administered with the explicit intention of shortening the newborn’s life.” From there, his team developed the protocol to provide a “careful framework for making decisions about newborn euthanasia” and to “start regulating the existing practice of newborn euthanasia.”Few countries allow children to undergo medical assistance in dying. Belgium, which removed age restrictions on the procedure in 2014, is the most liberal, while Colombia allows patients as young as six to “voluntarily” end their lives. Euthanasia for adults remains a polarizing question around the world. In the United Kingdom, a vote in Parliament earlier this month narrowly blocked new efforts to bring medically assisted death to England and Wales. A law authorizing euthanasia came into force in France last month. It is also currently legal in most of Australia as well as in Canada, Ecuador, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Uruguay. Across America, states have legalized euthanasia in recent years, with 14 jurisdictions now authorizing it in some form. This year, laws allowing medical aid in dying took effect in New York, Illinois and Delaware.

Doctors Objected To One-Year-Old Being Euthanized In Netherlands

Doctors Objected To One-Year-Old Being Euthanized In Netherlands

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