Category: Belgium

Belgian lawmakers to vote on world’s first death on demand law which would mean no doctor could stop a patient who wants to die

 Law is said to have high chance of getting support from parliamentarians

The Daily Mail

Steve Doughty

The world’s first ‘death on demand’ law is set to go before legislators in Belgium who have already ushered through an ultra-liberal euthanasia regime.

The new rules would mean no doctor would be allowed to block the wishes of a patient who asked to die.

The law – put forward by the country’s opposition socialist party – is thought to have a high chance of commanding support from a majority of parliamentarians.

They come at a time when numbers dying each year under the euthanasia laws have doubled in five years to reach more than 2,000. . . [Full text]

 

More bracket creep in Belgian euthanasia

BioEdge

Michael Cook

Three bills which could significantly expand the scope of euthanasia in Belgium have been proposed by Laurette Onkelinx, the leader of the Belgian Socialists and a former Deputy Prime Minister.

The first (PDF) would remove a five-year sunset clause for advance declaration of a patient’s willingness to accept euthanasia. This would mean that a document written 20 or 30 years before would be valid, no matter what a patient might have thought in recent times.

The second (PDF) would force doctors to give a rapid turn-around to requests for euthanasia. They would have to answer within seven days. If they refused, they would have to transfer the patient’s file to a doctor who would be willing to give a lethal injection. This threatens to remove physicians’ right to conscientious objection to euthanasia. It would also force doctors to treat a request as a matter of urgency, even though it might have come during a psychological crisis which would soon pass.

The third (PDF) would remove the right of institutions like hospitals or nursing homes to refuse to allow euthanasia on their premises. Ms Onkelinx insists that institutions have no right to conscientious objection; only doctors do. Her bill affirms a doctor’s right to follow his conscientious belief in the practice of euthanasia. In an explanatory memorandum, she invokes the principle that “a doctor can be neither forced to nor prevented from practicing euthanasia in legal conditions, wherever he might be.”

Although the proposals are radical, they have hardly been reported, even in the Belgian media.

 

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Dying Dutch: Euthanasia Spreads Across Europe

Newsweek

Winston Ross

In one of the last photographs my family took of my grandmother, she looks as if she’s been in a fistfight. Jean Bass Tinsley is lying in a hospital bed in Athens, Georgia, wearing a turquoise button-up shirt and staring blankly at the camera. A bandage obscures her fractured skull, along with the bridge of her bloodied nose. She is 91 years old.

My grandmother essentially did this to herself. In June 2013, she fell out of her wheelchair headfirst, after ignoring her caregivers’ warnings not to get out of bed without help. Earlier that year, she’d broken both of her hips, in separate falls. Before that, her pelvis-all while trying to do what for most of her life she’d managed just fine on her own: walk.

In her last year, dementia crept into my grandmother’s mind. The staff at her long-term-care facility plotted ways to protect her from herself. It’s against the law in Georgia to restrain patients in such facilities, so they lowered her bed to the floor and put a pad down next to it. They even installed an alarm that went off if she left her mattress. My grandmother disabled the alarm, moved the pad and freed herself, repeatedly. In the end, she was both too weak and too strong. [Full text]

 

Belgian serial rapist will not be euthanized: minister

Expatica (Belgium Edition)

A serial rapist and murderer who had won the right to die under Belgium’s controversial euthanasia laws will not now be put to death following fresh medical advice, authorities said Tuesday.

Frank Van Den Bleeken, who has spent 26 years in jail for repeated rapes and a rape-murder, will instead be moved from his prison in the northwestern city of Bruges to a new psychiatric treatment centre in Ghent, Justice Minister Koen Geens said.

The Flemish-language newspaper De Morgen reported Saturday that Van Den Bleeken would be voluntarily euthanized by lethal injection in Bruges prison on January 11. [Full text]

 

Belgian court grants killer rapist the right to be put to death after he argues he cannot overcome his violent sexual impulses

Frank Van Den Bleeken wants to end years of mental anguish

Will commit medically assisted suicide at jail in Bruges this week 
It comes 12 years after Belgium’s euthanasia law was introduced

Daily Mail

Mail Foreign Service

A rapist and murderer is to be put to death in Belgium, despite the EU ban on the death penalty, after a court granted him the right to euthanasia.

Frank Van Den Bleeken argued that he had no prospect of release because he cannot overcome his violent sexual impulses and wants to end years of mental anguish.

Van Den Bleeken, 51, will commit medically assisted suicide at a prison in Bruges this week. [Full text]