In 1991 the Dutch government after years of reports and allegations of involuntary euthanasia conducted it's own investigation and issued it's own report called the Remmelink Report. It confirmed that involuntary euthanasia was widely practiced by the medical profession in the Netherlands. Today reports and allegations are still common place. As any google search will confirm.
THE FACTS
The Remmelink Report– On September 10, 1991, the results of the first, official government study of the practice of Dutch euthanasia were released. The two volume report (6)–popularly referred to as the Remmelink Report (after Professor J. Remmelink, M.J., attorney general of the High Council of the Netherlands, who headed the study committee)–documents the prevalence ofinvoluntary euthanasia in Holland, as well as the fact that, to a large degree, doctors have taken over end-of-life decision making regarding euthanasia. The data indicate that, despite long-standing, court-approved euthanasia guidelines developed to protect patients, abuse has become an accepted norm. According to the Remmelink Report, in 1990:
■2,300 people died as the result of doctors killing them upon request (active, voluntary euthanasia).(7)
■400 people died as a result of doctors providing them with the means to kill themselves (physician-assisted suicide).(8)
■1,040 people (an average of 3 per day) died from involuntary euthanasia, meaning that doctors actively killed these patients without the patients’ knowledge or consent.(9) ■14% of these patients were fully competent. (10)
■72% had never given any indication that they would want their lives terminated. (11)
■In 8% of the cases, doctors performed involuntary euthanasia despite the fact that they believed alternative options were still possible. (12)
■In addition, 8,100 patients died as a result of doctors deliberately giving them overdoses of pain medication, not for the primary purpose of controlling pain, but to hasten the patient’s death. (13) In 61% of these cases (4,941 patients), the intentional overdose was given without the patient’s consent.(14)
■According to the Remmelink Report, Dutch physicians deliberately and intentionally ended the lives of 11,840 people by lethal overdoses or injections–a figure which accounts for 9.1% of the annual overall death rate of 130,000 per year. The majority of all euthanasia deaths in Holland are involuntary deaths.
■The Remmelink Report figures cited here do not include thousands of other cases, also reported in the study, in which life-sustaining treatment was withheld or withdrawn without the patient’s consent and with the intention of causing the patient’s death. (15) Nor do the figures include cases of involuntary euthanasia performed on disabled newborns, children with life-threatening conditions, or psychiatric patients. (16)
■The most frequently cited reasons given for ending the lives of patients without their knowledge or consent were: “low quality of life,” “no prospect for improvement,” and “the family couldn’t take it anymore.”(17)
■In 45% of cases involving hospitalized patients who were involuntarily euthanized, the patients’ families had no knowledge that their loved ones’ lives were deliberately terminated by doctors. (18)
■According to the 1990 census, the population of Holland is approximately 15 million. That is only half the population of California. To get some idea of how the Remmelink Report statistics would apply to the U.S., those figures would have to be multiplied 16.6 times (based on the 1990 U.S. census population of approximately 250 million).
Falsified Death Certificates —In the overwhelming majority of Dutch euthanasia cases, doctors–in order to avoid additional paperwork and scrutiny from local authorities–deliberately falsify patients’ death certificates, stating that the deaths occurred from natural causes. (19) In reference to Dutch euthanasia guidelines and the requirement that physicians report all euthanasia and assisted-suicide deaths to local prosecutors, a government health inspector recently told the New York Times: “In the end the system depends on the integrity of the physician, of what and how he reports. If the family doctor does not report a case of voluntary euthanasia or an assisted suicide, there is nothing to control.” (20)
Background about Euthanasia in The Netherlands | Patients Rights Council
