Last month, the Belgian Parliament, by a majority of 86 to 44, with 12 abstentions, passed a law allowing euthanasia for children. Dutch law allows the ending of life for children above the age of 12. Now Belgium has become the first country to remove even that age barrier.

According to the new law, a child may request authority to be helped to die if he or she is “in a hopeless medical situation of constant and unbearable suffering that cannot be eased and which will cause death in the short term”. The child must have made repeated requests, and have the support both of parents and of doctors. A psychological evaluation must establish that the child is not suffering from mental illness and is mentally ‘able’ to make the request to have his or her life ended.

Since it is truly hard to watch people suffer, and suffering on children seems particularly cruel, this may sound very humane, and the measures put in place very reasonable. Apparently the Belgians were astonished at the furore in other countries regarding the law their Parliament passed.

Not all Belgians, of course, agreed with the proposed legislation. A total of 160 paediatricians had signed an open letter arguing that the new law was unnecessary, and that modern medicine was perfectly capable of soothing the pain of the sickest of children.

Similarly, all major faiths in Belgium united in opposing the proposed legislation.

An obvious initial question is how truly capable a child is of taking such a weighty decision about ending life.

The fundamental consideration regarding euthanasia is that the basis for all ethical living together in a civil society is complete respect for human life from conception to natural death. Since all we do and are depends on human life, we must, in society, cherish and protect human life as that value without which all normal and all noble attainments (true human love, honest work, moral choices, scientific discoveries, artistic creativity, and so forth) cannot exist.

Direct euthanasia involves putting an end to the lives of sick or dying people, or of people with a disability. Nobody may rationally and ethically assist in terminating the life of another.

If the principle underpinning euthanasia is accepted, then the weakest members of society risk being eliminated

In the last resort, even given the good intention of eliminating suffering, an act or omission that leads to another’s death goes against the dignity of the human person and amounts to murder. Even the best of intentions (here: sparing a child further suffering) cannot ‘heal’ what is in itself morally unacceptable.

If the principle underpinning euthanasia is accepted, namely that we may in certain circumstances help end the lives of others, then in the short or long term, the weakest and most vulnerable members of society, those who do not ‘produce’ and are considered a burden, risk being eliminated – something that has already happened in 20th-century Europe.

Medicine has developed palliative care precisely as a loving way of showing respect and disinterested love for those close to death. Here, the warm love of relatives and friends combines with professional nursing care, thereby helping and strengthening a suffering person to face approaching death. But palliative care refrains from accelerating death by any action that would intentionally terminate life.

It can be ethically legitimate to interrupt medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary or disproportionate to the expected outcome. This amounts to avoiding ‘overzealous’ treatment. Here one has no intention to cause death; the inability to impede it is simply accepted (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 2278).

For the Christian believer, God the Creator is the Lord of life. We may not ‘play God’ by taking decisions about the natural end of the life of others. This is not an additional argument to the ones presented above, but at the heart of them. When we talk about a civil society being built on the moral respect for the life of others, we are saying that life is to be treated as sacred, which is exactly why God says “thou shalt not kill”.

Fr Robert Soler is a member of the Society of Jesus.

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