The Killing Fields of Holland: Next It's the Kids
From the Netherlands to California, from stem cells to nanotechnology, how we treat life matters.
by Nigel M. de S. Cameron
posted 11/09/2005 09:00 a.m.

For nearly a generation, a small country with a long (and often profoundly Christian) history has been making a name for itself in a whole new way. The Dutch, famed for tulips, windmills, and heroic resistance to the Nazis, have made a fateful choice—to put their nation back on the map flying the death's head. The land that a century ago produced Abraham Kuyper, journalist, prime minister, theologian, and perhaps the greatest "Christian worldview" thinker of modern times, is taking a new kind of lead. While the United Kingdom ushers in the Brave New World in new technologies, the Netherlands (as Holland is also known) is dismantling the right to life of the sick and handicapped and turning its hospitals into slaughter-houses.

According to press reports, "Under the [Groningen] protocol, euthanasia would be permissible when a child is terminally ill with no prospect of recovery and suffering great pain, when two sets of doctors agree the situation is hopeless and when parents give their consent." The Anti-Euthanasia Task Force carries this report, and gives all the depressing background you could want to read. The Groningen Protocol, named for the hospital where it was devised, is an early epitaph on the humane medical tradition that sprang from twin roots—the best of the pagan doctors, Hippocrates, and the Judeo-Christian view of human dignity. the rest