Euthanasia matters
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I was startled to learn that more than 5% of the total deaths in the Netherlands last year were via euthanasia. Many of these deaths were of elderly people with clearly terminal illnesses, but apparently there’s now something of a trend of cases that resemble this one:
A 28-year-old woman in the Netherlands has opted to end her life with euthanasia instead of living with mental illness.
Zoraya ter Beek, who lives in the small town of Oldenzaal, told The Free Press in an interview published on Monday, April 1, that she expects to be euthanized in early May, having lived with depression, autism, and borderline personality disorder.
“I was always very clear that if it doesn’t get better. I can’t do this anymore,” she told the media company, explaining that the procedure will take place at her home with “no music.”
“I will be going on the couch in the living room,” she said, per The Free Press.
Ter Beek, who lives with her 40-year-old boyfriend and their two cats, told the media company that a psychiatrist previously told her that “there’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better.”
On the one hand, this particular story is currently all over the right wing media (The Free Press is Bari Weiss’s latest burst of entrepreneurship), so my natural inclination is to view this kind of story as an attempt to gin up moral panic for nefarious reasons.
On the other, there really are some tough issues here. Encouraging young otherwise healthy people struggling with mental illness — and autism [!] — to consider the option of killing themselves strikes me as highly problematic, especially given the sordid history of euthanasia’s relationship to eugenics, “life unworthy of life” as they used to say in German, etc.
I haven’t thought any of his through carefully, or studied the issue in any detail, but I think it’s worth discussing for anyone who isn’t a doctrinaire libertarian, or old school doctrinal Catholic or similar.