Nearly 2% of all people who die in Belgium are euthanised without consent, a new report has found.
According to the report, entitled ‘First do no harm: intentionally shortening lives of patients without their explicit request in Belgium’, 1.7% of all Belgian deaths are as a result of doctors euthanising patients without prior consent of any form. Two thirds of those killed in this way were in hospital but not suffering for a terminal illness, while half of those euthanised were aged over 80 years.
The report also pointed out that many Belgian doctors today do not feel it necessary to discuss a decision to euthanise with a patient’s family as it is a medical decision for them alone to reach.
The report, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, serves to confirm a similar report in March. ‘Recent Trends in Euthanasia and Other End-of-Life Practices in Belgium’, from the New England Journal of Medicine, revealed a similar statistic for Belgium’s total deaths of 61,621 in 2013, meaning some 1,000 patients had their lives ended without requesting such a procedure.
Having introduced euthanasia in the year 2002, Belgium extended the practice to include minors in 2014.
The latest figures place Belgium in the lead place for euthanasia worldwide, overtaking The Netherlands in 2014 for its rate of ‘hastened death’. Since 2007, the country has seen a doubling of the rate of patients euthanised. The year 2013 alone saw a 27% increase in the procedure to 1,816 cases, that is, an average of nearly 5 per day.
The author of the latest report, Professor Raphael Cohen-Almagor of England’s Hull University said: “It is worrying that some physicians take upon themselves the responsibility to deliberately shorten patients’ lives without a clear indication from the patients that this is what they would want.
“The Belgian population should be aware of the present situation and know that if their lives may come to the point where physicians think they are not worth living, in the absence of specific living wills advising physicians what to do then, they might be put to death.’
