This is right out of Science Fiction, but, then, what isn't these days?

Surprise! In Flanders, where euthanasia is legal, doctors seem to be killing elderly patients without their consent as often as they kill them with consent.

I suppose this shouldn't really be a surprise, but it's useful to have it documented. In Flanders, where active euthanasia is legal, doctors are killing nearly as many people without their request as with it. The study (based on the doctors' own answers to a questionnaire) found that the people killed without their own request were primarily 80 years old or more and were usually unable to be part of the "decision" because of dementia or coma.


While the authors of the study make some feeble gestures in the direction of wishing to reduce the number of terminations without request, their preferred solution is...ta-dum!--end-of-life planning. In other words, if we can just get the old people to say ahead of time that they want to be killed if they become demented, then when we kill them later, that will be with their consent. Problem solved.

Here is the CMAJ - Canadian Medical Association Journal - abstract coyly entitled "Physician-assisted deaths under the euthanasia law in Belgium: a population-based survey."  The summary reports:

Methods: We mailed a questionnaire regarding the use of life-ending drugs with or without explicit patient request to physicians who certified a representative sample (n =6927) of death certificates of patients who died in Flanders between June and November 2007.

Results: The response rate was 58.4%. Overall, 208 deaths involving the use of life-ending drugs were reported: 142 (weighted prevalence 2.0%) were with an explicit patient request (euthanasia or assisted suicide) and 66 (weighted prevalence 1.8%) were without an explicit request. Euthanasia and assisted suicide mostly involved patients less than 80 years of age, those with cancer and those dying at home. Use of life-ending drugs without an explicit request mostly involved patients 80 years of older, those with a disease other than cancer and those in hospital. Of the deaths without an explicit request, the decision was not discussed with the patient in 77.9% of cases. Compared with assisted deaths with the patient’s explicit request, those without an explicit request were more likely to have a shorter length of treatment of the terminal illness, to have cure as a goal of treatment in the last week, to have a shorter estimated time by which life was shortened and to involve the administration of opioids.

Get the euphemism - "without an explicit request"?

If the request wasn't explicit, how was the request made?  As indicated from the bolded portion of the summary, it sure wasn't discussed.  Were these elderly patients communicating their "requests" by telepathy? 

Or are Belgian doctors just particularly intutive when it comes to discerning that their elderly patients want to be murdered?
Terrific, the secular gnomes of Belgium have turned the medical profession into mass murderers.