Belgium has allowed twin blind brothers who were not suffering from a terminal illness to be killed under its 
euthanasia laws.
The 45-year-old brothers from the Antwerp region were born deaf and sought euthanasia after finding that they would also soon go blind. They told doctors they were unable to bear the thought of not being able to see each other again.
The case is unusual because neither of the men was terminally ill or suffering extreme physical pain, the Daily Telegraph reports.
It took the men two years to find someone willing to kill them by lethal injection.
Just days after the twins were killed by doctors, Belgium’s ruling Socialists tabled a legal amendment that will allow the euthanasia of children and Alzheimer’s sufferers.
The change will allow minors and those with dementia to seek permission to die.
The European Institute of Bioethics has already criticised the current law in Belgium, in a report reviewing ten years of euthanasia in the country.
Dr Peter Saunders, director of campaign group Care not Killing, warned in response to the report: “The lessons are clear. Once you relax the law on euthanasia or assisted suicide steady extension will follow as night follows day.”
He added that what we are witnessing in Belgium is “the steady intentional escalation of numbers with a gradual widening of the categories of patients to be included”.
If passed later this year, the proposed law reform will allow euthanasia to be “extended to minors if they are capable of discernment or affected by an incurable illness or suffering that we cannot alleviate”.
In 2002, Belgium was the second country in the world after Holland to legalise euthanasia, but the law currently applies only to people over 18.
Belgium’s ‘Het Laatste Nieuws’ newspaper reported at the weekend that doctors at Brussels University Hospital in Jette “euthanised” the two men by lethal injection last month.
Under Belgian law, euthanasia is allowed if those wishing to end their lives are able to make their wishes clear and a doctor judges that they are suffering unbearable suffering. The case of the twins shows this need not be physical suffering.
David Dufour, the doctor who presided over the euthanasia, said the twins had died together and had taken the decision in “full conscience”.
“They were very happy. It was a relief to see the end of their suffering,” he said. “They had a cup of coffee in the hall, it went well and a rich conversation. Then the separation from their parents and brother was very serene. At the last there was a little wave of their hands and then they were gone.”
He stated: “There was certainly unbearable psychological suffering for them. Though there is of course it [sic] always possible to stretch the interpretation of that. One doctor will evaluate differently from another”.
Some 1,133 cases of euthanasia, mostly for terminal cancer, were recorded in 2011, according to the last official figures.