A doctor who drugged a 74-year-old woman’s drink with a sedative before administrating a lethal drug while her family members held her down will become the first health care worker to be prosecuted for breaking euthanasia laws in The Netherlands, according to Dutch News. A public prosecutor in The Hague released a statement which said the doctor was unable to unambiguously conclude the patient wanted to die. The case is the first prosecution since Dutch laws on euthanasia were crafted in 2002 to allow a doctor to euthanize a patient if they were experiencing unbearable suffering and were making an informed decision to die. The patient in the case was in a nursing home and suffered from severe dementia but had signed a living will five years earlier which said she wanted euthanasia if she was competent in her mind at the time of its execution. Prosecutors said the woman gave conflicting statements about her desire for the decision and her mental health deteriorated by the time of her death. The doctor secretly dosed her coffee with a sedative during an earlier meeting with the patient and her family, according to a medical complaints board report referenced by the prosecutor’s office. The woman felt sleepy but did not go to sleep so a second dose of the drug was administered via injection, but she expressed pain when the doctor put the needle in. Once she was asleep, the doctor attempted to administer a lethal dose of a different drug, but… [Read full story]
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