“To ensure the patient’s compliance, the doctor gave her coffee spiked with a sedative.” When that proved insufficient and the woman recoiled from the looming needle, he “asked family members to hold her down.” Finally, “After 15 minutes were spent by the doctor trying to find a vein, the lethal infusion flowed.”

Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims. Next on BreakPoint, more proof that euthanasia is a bad idea.

Back in 2015, I told you about a piece by Washington Post columnist Charles Lane. In it, he described what he called the “sinister” expansion of physician-assisted suicide in places like the Netherlands and Belgium.

Lane wrote that “What’s noteworthy about euthanasia in Europe . . .  has been its tendency to expand, once the taboo against physician-aided death was breached in favor of more malleable concepts such as ‘patient autonomy.’”

One study by leading bioethicists concluded that reports from the Low Countries “seem to validate concerns about where these practices might lead.” To that, Lane replied, “That’s putting it mildly.”

Two years later, Lane has turned his sights, and hopefully those of his readers, on euthanasia once more. The lede in his latest column is the story of a 74-year-old Dutch woman referred to in Dutch records as “2016-85.”

The woman, who suffered from dementia, had an “ambiguously worded” advanced directive requesting euthanasia. By the time she was placed in a nursing home, “she was no longer able to clarify her wishes.” So her husband requested it for her.

That still left the problem of whether she really wanted it. Well, that was not a problem for the Dutch euthanasia machine. The doctor “concluded her suffering was unbearable and incurable—though there was no terminal physical illness—and prepared a lethal injection.”

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