Active End-of-Life Decisions in Dutch Pediatrics, Should the Age Limit be Revised?
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (fictive French movie released in 2008): Juliette Fontaine was a French physician and diagnosed her son with Gaucher’s disease, a very painful and progressive disease first described in 1882 by Philippe Gaucher. Gaucher’s disease is a genetic disorder and is associated with a lot of different symptoms like fatigue, hepatomegaly, splenomegaly, anemia, severe pain and neurological abnormalities. The disease is untreatable and patients typically die within 2 years.1 Piece by piece, her sister Léa finds out why Juliette killed Pierre. Since euthanasia is illegal in France and there were no other possibilities to relieve the child’s suffering, Juliette saw no other way out than killing her own son. She did not want to see the suffering of her child and injected him with a deadly substance. At her trial, she spoke no word of defense and stated she deserved to be punished. She was released after she served a prison sentence of 15 years. ‘What if you want your child to die?’How can a parent become so desperate, that he or she is capable of doing such a horrible thing? How is someone willing to sacrifice the life of her son and 15 years of her own life? In some cases, there are no available methods to relieve the suffering of a child, for example because the life expectancy does not meet the criteria of palliative sedation. The key question underlying this kind of situations is: what are the possibilities in terms of life-ending decisions when a child suffers unbearably, the quality of life is very low and there are no possibilities left to relieve the suffering? Many parents of terminally ill children aged 1 to 12 struggle with this dilemma. In the Netherlands, people over the age of 12 can request euthanasia. Furthermore, life-ending decisions in infants (<1 year old) are tolerated under strict conditions (Groningen Protocol). It is...
Add new contribution