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A Belgian bill granting terminally ill children the right to die, a legal option already possessed by adults in the country, is widely expected to pass into law.
Belgian lawmakers have clashed sharply over the bill. Proponents view it as a question of mercy, while critics say the bill has been rushed and lacks a medical rationale.
“Our responsibility is to allow everybody to live, but also to die, in dignity,” said Karine Lalieux, a Socialist member of the House of Representatives. AP reported that Lalieux favours extending Belgium’s 2002 euthanasia law to minors under 18, provided that their parents approve and they understand what the decision means.
But Sonja Becq, a Christian Democratic colleague, denounced the notion, saying modern-day science is capable of relieving pain in very sick children until their illness runs its natural course.
“We cannot accept that euthanasia be presented as a ‘happy ending’,” she said.
The Senate, the other chamber of the federal legislature, adopted the legislation by a wide margin in December.
To guarantee that terminally ill children understand what euthanasia signifies, Belgium’s proposed legislation requires they demonstrate to a psychologist or psychiatrist that they possess the “capacity of discernment.”
Protests over the child-euthanasia question have gripped Belgium for days.
The Catholic church staged “a day of fasting and prayer” in protest earlier this month, and some 160 paediatricians on Wednesday petitioned lawmakers to postpone the vote on the grounds that it was ill-prepared and unnecessary. “Pain can be eased nowadays; there’s been huge progress in palliative care,” Nadine Francotte, a cancer specialist in the city of Liege, said.
But Dominique Lossignol, a palliative specialist at the Bordet cancer clinic in Brussels, told the AFP news agency that doctors “do not have control over all types of pain, either physical or moral”. — AFP
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