Abstract
The next question was: The Remmelink Commission held that actively ending life when the vital functions have started failing is indisputably normal medical practice.1 Is this correct? What is your opinion?
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References
Henk A.M.J. ten Have, “Euthanasia: The Dutch Experience,” Annals de la Real Academia Nacional de Medicina, Tomo CXII (Madrid, 1995), p. 429.
House of Lords, Select Committee on Medical Ethics, session 1993–94, Vol. II, Minutes of Oral Evidence (London: HMSO, 1994), at 33.
In his comments, van Dantzig wrote: “I hope that you will be so kind as to remove all linkage between Prof. Dupuis and myself. She is a friend of mine, and I hold her in the highest regard, but on some things we are of different opinions.” Personal communication on July 6, 2000.
In “A Case Against Dutch Euthanasia,” op. cit., pp. 24–25, Fenigsen argued that in 1987, a series of killings of comatose patients took place at the department of neurosurgery at the Free University Hospital in Amsterdam. Four nurses were responsible for these serial killings. Furthermore, a doctor was apprehended in The Hague under suspicion of having killed twenty inhabitants of the De Terp old people’s home without their consent or knowledge. He pleaded guilty to five, was accused of four, and convicted of three killings. Witnesses testified that some of the victims were not ill but only senile and querulous, and that the doctor was impatient with elderly people, reluctant to treat them, frequently absent, and left many decisions to the male head nurse. Hendin writes on angels of death, a team of travelling physicians that provided euthanasia to patients when family doctors were unwilling to do so. See Herbert Hendin, Seduced by Death, op. cit., pp. 110–113.
According to the physicians’ interviews in the 1995 survey, physicians consulted with a colleague in 93% of the reported cases, but in only 18% of the unreported cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Gerrit van der Wal and P.J. van der Maas, “Empirical Research on Euthanasia and Other Medical End-of-Life Decisions and the Euthanasia Notification Procedure,” in David C. Thomasma et al. (eds.), Asking to Die, op., cit., Table 6, p. 176.
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(2005). The Remmelink Contention and the British Criticism. In: Euthanasia in the Netherlands. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2251-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2251-7_8
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