The Netherlands opens investigation into three euthanasia cases
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Three euthanasia cases involving women with psychiatric conditions and dementia are under investigation in the Netherlands.
Dutch prosecutors confirmed that the deaths, in 2017 and 2018, were being investigated for potentially breaching strict conditions in the 2002 law that allows people in the Netherlands to ask a doctor to help them die.
The latest report by the Dutch Regional Euthanasia Committees shows prosecutors are investigating a doctor for failing to treat the case of a woman with “due diligence” last year.
According to the report, a woman in her 70s with depression had been operated on for abdominal problems when surgeons found evidence of lung cancer. She approached her doctor, saying she was experiencing unbearable psychological suffering and wanted euthanasia. Her doctor’s colleague took on the case, but the review committee said, failed to obtain a second opinion from an independent psychiatrist, as is required.
The two other cases, from 2017, involve a woman in her 60s with Alzheimer’s whom an independent consultant did not judge to be suffering badly enough, and another in her 80s with osteoarthritis and other problems who refused other treatment.
The confirmation comes two weeks after news organisations around the world incorrectly reported that Noa Pothoven, a 17-year-old Dutch girl with anorexia, who had been sexually abused as a child, had died through euthanasia.
Separately, in August, a Dutch doctor will be the first prosecuted for failings, in a 2016 case, in which sedatives were put in a dementia patient’s coffee and her family asked to hold her down when she struggled against the euthanasia injection.
