Ten years on from becaming the first countries to legalise euthanasia, the Netherlands and Belgium now provide assisted suicide to 4,000 people a year.
While most are cancer sufferers, a new interpretation of the law is extending the treatment to those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease as well.
Since euthanasia became legal in the Netherlands in April 2002, “the statute has remained unchanged, but what has changed is the the way doctors interpret it,” said Inge Freriksen, spokeswoman for the Dutch health ministry.
‘Mercy killing’ by lethal injection is allowed in the Netherlands for patients who are fully mentally alert but whose suffering has become “unbearable and unending” due to incurable disease.
About a third of all the requests deemed to be “serious” are honoured by doctors, the ministry said.
“The concept of ‘unbearable suffering’ has become much clearer” over the years, said Eric van Wijlick, policy maker at the Royal Dutch Society of Doctors.
The overwhelming majority of patients who were euthanised in the Netherlands in 2010 suffered from terminal cancer, about 80 percent choosing to die at home.
Six roving medical teams — each with a doctor and a nurse — were recently set up to assist people to die at home when their own local doctors refused to give them lethal injections.
Their intervention has already been requested 100 times since the teams were set up in March, De Jong said.
But this has raised questions in the Dutch medical association.
Euthanasia has become the central point of conversation between a doctor and a patient who is suffering when it should be seen as a “last resort”, Wijlick said.
Belgium followed the Dutch example later in 2002 with a law legalising euthanasia after a long debate between Christian and secular parties.
There were 1,133 mercy killings in Belgium in 2011, representing 1.0 percent of deaths in the country, its Commission for the Evaluation and Control of Euthanasia reported.
