Begging so many questions

Readers may or may not remember the story I posted about 2 1/2 years ago concerning the Dutch doctor who told family members to hold down an elderly woman so that she (the doctor) could administer a lethal injection. The doctor had secretly drugged the woman in her coffee, but she woke up and put up a fight for her life, so they held her down and killed her anyway.

There was an itty bit of tut-tutting surrounding this, and the Dutch called for a trial, not (mind you) so that justice would be done for this open act of forcible murder, but so that the court could exonerate the doctor, thus paving the way for more such acts. Yep, really. They said so in scarcely coded language at the time.

Well, that all went just as predicted.

You see, the woman had previously said that she would want a lethal injection “when it was time.” Then she developed worse and worse dementia and continued not to feel that it “was time.” But she was going downhill, so the doctor, and presumably the family, decided that the previous version of the woman would have thought that this was “time,” so they decided to bump her off. To follow her wishes. (Got that?)

And that’s exactly what the court declared.

Judges said the doctor acted lawfully as not carrying out the process would have undermined the patient’s wish.

Um, what? She fought the doctor. How was lethally injecting her carrying our her wish? Oh, not that wish. The other wish. The wish she had before, see? When we presume she was rational. Then if she decides later she wants to live when she’s no longer deemed to be mentally all there, that wish doesn’t count. So we hold her down and lethally inject her. To carry out her wish. Makes sense, right, right?

Lydia McGrew, Choice Devours Itself: Murder affirmed in the Netherlands