Belgium may allow euthanasia for dementia patients

Politicians debate change to the existing law to include those who believe their life is ‘fulfilled’

BELGIUM and the Netherlands are considering allowing euthanasia for patients with dementia.

Both countries have taken steps to liberalising rules which allow people to choose when to die and with medical support, with Belgium mulling over whether to allow euthanasia for people without terminal illness who consider their “lives fulfilled”.

Euthanasia is only permitted in Belgium for people with all their faculties or those who have made a written declaration before falling into an irreversible coma.

The Flemish socialists and liberal parties are pushing for the law to be changed to allow dementia patients to state their wish to die while they are still lucid. Euthanasia has support in Belgium, especially in the Dutchspeaking region of Flanders, where eight out of ten people support extending the law to covering dementia.

Belgian MPS have also begun debating further opening up the euthanasia laws so that anyone considering their “lives fulfilled” can opt to die, even if they do not have a terminal illness.

Current rules require “intolerable and irreversible suffering” and close consultation with doctors. Final approval on a change in the law is still a way off but Gwendolyn Rutten, the president of the liberal Open VLD said the time was right to open a debate.

“We must be able to put an end to it not only when we suffer unbearably, but also when our life is finished and when we claim it explicitly, freely, independently and durably,” she said.

She cited the case of Belgian Paralympic champion Marieke Vervoort, a star at the London 2012 Games. The 40-year-old chose to die by euthanasia this year after suffering decades of pain from reflex sympathetic dystrophy. In 2018, two terminally ill children, aged nine and 11, were given lethal injections in Belgium and became the world’s youngest people to be euthanised. The N-VA, Belgium’s largest party, and the centre-right CDV, oppose extending the laws until there is a thorough evaluation of the current rules, which were introduced in 2002.

There is also likely to be opposition after the 2018 case of a dementia patient who was euthanised without ever requesting to die. The decision was made at the family’s request. “As liberal countries and with our neighbours to the north, we have always been at the forefront of this struggle for freedom and self-determination,” Ms Rutten said, in reference to the Netherlands.

A legal opinion to the Dutch supreme court in December said that euthanasia of patients with dementia was allowed, provided a request was made when the person was still lucid. In September, a doctor was acquitted of failing to verify a dementia patient’s consent before performing euthanasia.