Welcome to our shiny rational, secular utopia.

Dutch mobile euthanasia units to make house calls:

A controversial system of mobile euthanasia units that will travel around the country to respond to the wishes of sick people who wish to end their lives has been launched in the Netherlands.

The scheme, which started on Thursday , will send teams of specially trained doctors and nurses to the homes of people whose own doctors have refused to carry out patients' requests to end their lives.

The launch of the so-called Levenseinde, or "Life End", house-call units – whose services are being offered to Dutch citizens free of charge – coincides with the opening of a clinic of the same name in The Hague, which will take patients with incurable illnesses as well as others who do not want to die at home.

The scheme is an initiative by the Dutch Association for a Voluntary End to Life (NVVE), a 130,000-member euthanasia organisation that is the biggest of its kind in the world.

"From Thursday, the Life End clinic will have mobile teams where people who believe they are eligible for euthanasia can register," Walburg de Jong, a NVVE spokesman, said.

"If they do comply, the teams will be able to carry out the euthanasia at patients' homes should their regular doctors be unable or refuse to help them," he added.

The Netherlands was the first country to legalise euthanasia in 2002 and its legislation on the right to die is considered to be the most liberal in the world.

But doctors cannot be forced to comply with the wishes of patients who request the right to die and many do refuse, which was what prompted NVVE to develop a system to fill the gap.

Sick people or their relatives can submit their applications via telephone or email and if the patient's request fulfils a number of strict criteria, the team is then dispatched.

Sick people or their relatives....that's re-assuring.

Also:

Every year 2,300 to 3,100 mercy killings are carried out in the Netherlands, although opponents of the practice claim the figure is much higher because many cases are not registered. The Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) supports euthanasia in principle if there is no alternative, but has distanced itself from the NVVE initiative, arguing that giving it the name Life End will foster the idea that it is for those who it said are simply "weary of life" rather than those who are sick.

After all, a 130,000 member "euthanasia organization" in a tiny country couldn't possibly create a social attitude that the old and sick ought to be willing to remove themselves from the presence of the living.

The Netherlands appears to be right on schedule.

One of the most prescient science fiction story I've read is "Lord of the World" by Robert Hughes Benson.

The strange thing is that you really wouldn't have appreciated its prescience before 2008. Lord of the World was written in 1907. It is set near the end of the 20th Century, it seems around the 1970s. The world has secularized. The Catholic Church is hanging on in Ireland and Rome, but churches everywhere else have become museums or vacant. The anti-christ seems to have arrived in the form of a previously unknown Midwestern American one-term Senator, with a gift for charismatic speaking, but no one seems to remember the gist of what he said the day after his speech.

And euthanasia is administered to accident victims by roving "ambulances."

"Lord of the World" is the original "steampunk." "Steampunk" is the genre that re-imagines the future from perspective of assuming that Edwardian and Victorian technology continued in essentially a straight-line development. Robert Hughes Benson was an Edwardian, and a Catholic priest, who envisioned the future as a straightline development of what he saw in his world. People in Benson's future travel by train and "volors," which seems to be a kind of "ornithopter" or, possibly, a winged zeppelin. His sociological developments in particular assume a near-straightline development, and as as consequence, we are shown a world that is both oddly civilized and oddly uncivilized - and completely de-humanized.

Flying squads of euthanizers would have fit right into the dystopian world envisioned by Benson.