Netherlands does the unthinkable: euthanize a young child

(LifeSiteNews) — I knew it was coming, but it still felt like a Rubicon has been crossed to read the news in black and white: For the first time since legalization in 2024, a child between the ages of one and 12 — we don’t know if the child was a boy or girl — was euthanized in the Netherlands. A child was killed by state-sanctioned lethal injection. A child.

I should note that this isn’t the first time a born child has been killed in the Netherlands. Under the 2004 Groningen Protocol, which one journal described as the regulation of “the practice of actively ending the life of newborns and to prevent uncontrolled and justified killing,” at least 22 infants have been killed at their parents’ request.

Child euthanasia was legalized in 2024. At the time, Dutch Health Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Hugo de Jonge issued a briefing laying out the rationale: “The NVK believes an extension of existing (Committee Regulations) regarding late termination of pregnancy and termination of life in newborns … to be the appropriate step to meet the identified need from practice and provide physicians with the desired legal protection.”

As the Dutch government notes on its website: “This decision (to terminate the child’s life) is always made in consultation with the parents and, if possible, also with the child.” Consent no longer matters. If possible, also with the child.

For decades, pro-lifers warned that the legalization and normalization of abortion would inevitably result in killing outside the womb, at any and all ages, based on whatever regulations governments felt were justified. In the health minister’s brief, that was explicit. If late-term abortion and infanticide are legal in some circumstances, why not children? Once the law on killing people fell, the dam began to crack. Now it has broken.

The public found out that a Dutch doctor had “ended the life of a terminally ill child” in a letter written by Health Minister Sophie Hermans to Parliament. Hermans stated that the special committee established to assess euthanasia for children got the report last year; the assessment committee reviewed the child’s case; interviewed the doctor and then delivered its assessment to the Public Prosecution Service.

It is now up to the Public Prosecution Service to decide whether the doctor who killed the child did so legally. “Much of the international press coverage has been expressed in terms of shock, but the news barely created any reaction in the Netherlands,” Yuan Yi Zhu noted in the Telegraph. “If it is not quite a man-bites-dog story, its newsworthiness is blunted within a society which long ago decreed that the state-sponsored killing of children could be allowed in some circumstances.”

First it was babies in the womb. Then it was suffering adults, with their consent. The 2004 Groningen Protocol expanded the killing again, without consent of the infant victims. The last category with legal protection from any form of killing was children between ages one and 12. In 2024, the law changed. Now, a child has been killed. More will certainly follow.