Ate Vegter column photo© Photo Ella Tilgenkamp
Ate Vegter
Today at 06:28
When I was young and attractive, I didn’t think much about euthanasia. It did come up every now and then. I had it in the back of my mind as a possibility that could end my life at the end of my life, when the suffering had become too much for me. As I’ve gotten older, I’m too curious to stop early. I want to experience everything. But if the pain gets too bad, that can change.
The whole way of thinking about death has changed significantly in recent years and, in my opinion, this has a lot to do with dechristianization. In the past, when everyone still went to church, life was a gift from God who could dispose of it at His discretion. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord, we said when a young girl had died.
Now the view is increasingly prevalent that life is our own. That we decide for ourselves when we have children, when we want to die and that the medical profession does not decide but supports where necessary.
That is why it is so curious that the Public Prosecution Service has judged so harshly about that naive group of elderly people around the drug .
These naive elderly people have always envisioned that they can pull the plug when they feel that their lives are complete. That in itself is not punishable. Only assisting suicide is punishable and there they are teetering on the edge of the abyss.
I sincerely hope that this strict condemnation will not only lead to better euthanasia legislation, but also that more people, laypeople and doctors, will think about how people who are not necessarily suffering unbearably can still be saved from life at their request.
