Why Euthanasia for Children Shouldn’t Surprise Us

The Netherlands provides a chilling example of where the culture of death leads

By Trent Horn

The slippery slope in the Netherlands continues to get steeper as the government recently announced that it participated in the legalized killing of a child. The Dutch health minister said, “At the end of 2025, the committee received its first report of life termination of a child between the ages of one and twelve years.”

Few other details are available about the case, so we don’t know if this is a kind of assisted suicide being provided for an older child who desired to end his own life or if it was simply an act of euthanasia against a younger child who would be unaware of the life-ending measures being taken.

What we do know is that this is par for the course in the Netherlands and other countries that have embraced assisted suicide and euthanasia policies. In May of 2024, the Dutch government helped a physically healthy 29-year-old autistic woman kill herself. In Canada, assisted suicide accounts for one out of every twenty deaths, making it one of Canada’s leading causes of death, surpassing car accidents and even diseases like influenza and pneumonia.

That children are now the victims of euthanasia shouldn’t be surprising for two reasons.

First, these proposals always begin with the most tragic cases, usually of elderly patients who are dying from a terminal disease. Euthanasia advocates convince people that this isn’t really “killing,” but just “choice in dying.” However, once the suicidal camel gets his nose under the tent, there’s no principled reason to stop him from running out the back door and jumping off a cliff.

If it is moral to kill patients because they may have to endure six months of suffering before they die, then what about patients who don’t have a terminal disease and may suffer for six years? Or six decades? This naturally leads to calls for children to have the same “right” to avoid suffering that adults legally possess.

But what about adults and children who are too young or disabled to express a desire to end their life?

Normally, when people are suicidal, we do everything we can to help them out of that decision, even using physical force to restrain them. But to justify assisted suicide, society has to distinguish between “lives worth living” that render suicide a choice for the mentally ill and “lives not worth living” that only a mentally ill person would continue. In Nazi Germany, this kind of person was called Lebensunwertes Leben—life unworthy of life.

For those who relegate some human beings to this category, it makes sense to end those lives, even if they are incapable of asking to be killed.

Second, the euthanasia of children in the Netherlands shouldn’t surprise us because the reasoning that allows for killing these children also justifies so-called “therapeutic abortion,” or the killing of sick unborn children. Even people who oppose abortion as a form of birth control will acquiesce to its use on unborn children who will be severely disabled or not survive long after birth.

In trying to convince people that even these kinds of abortions are wrong, I ask them if we should kill a two-year-old who has become disabled or has suffered so severe an accident that he will die in a few months. Some will recognize that if we wouldn’t kill a two-year-old because he is sick, disabled, or dying, then we shouldn’t kill an unborn child for the same reason.

But some people take the perversely wrong lesson from this comparison. If we would abort an unborn child because of a disability, then why not do the same for a born child? Peter Singer boldly accepts this conclusion and writes the following in his book Practical Ethics:

At present parents can choose whether to keep or destroy their disabled offspring only if the disability happens to be detected during pregnancy. There is no logical basis for restricting parents’ choice to these particular disabilities. If disabled newborn infants were not regarded as having a right to life until, say, a week or a month after birth, it would allow parents, in consultation with their doctors, to choose on the basis of far greater knowledge of the infant’s condition than is possible before birth (66).

Singer gruesomely agrees with pro-life advocates that it is inconsistent to support abortion and not infanticide:

We cannot coherently hold that it is all right to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive. The solution, however, is not to accept the pro-life view that the fetus is a human being with the same moral status as yours or mine. The solution is the very opposite: to abandon the idea that all human life is of equal worth. (See Singer and Kuhse, “On Letting Handicapped Infants Die” in The Right Thing to Do, 146.)

The solution to this evil is to unabashedly value every human being, regardless of things like age and health. That means we should resist nonsensical terms like “therapeutic abortion” as much as possible. Killing a sick patient doesn’t count as “therapy” any more than throwing a car into a junkyard compactor counts as “automotive repair.”

Pope St. John Paul II said this mentality is part of a “culture of death” that values efficiency over virtue. He said that in this culture, “a person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or lifestyle of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of ‘conspiracy against life’ is unleashed” (Evangelium Vitae 12).

This attitude is by no means restricted to children in the womb. In 1982, parents of a newborn with Down syndrome named “Baby Doe” withheld a common surgery to help the baby digest food. The case made national news and, even though the hospital fought the decision, the courts sided with the parents, who allowed their child to die five days later.

If Baby Doe had forty-six chromosomes in her DNA instead of the forty-seven people with Down syndrome possess, this would have been considered a heinous murder. But it wasn’t because the victim was disabled and had a life the courts considered “unworthy of life.” A week after Baby Doe was killed, columnist George Will offered a brilliant retort by citing the life of his own son who had Down syndrome:

Jonathan Will, 10, fourth-grader and Orioles fan (and the best Wiffle-ball hitter in southern Maryland), has Down’s syndrome. He does not “suffer from” (as newspapers are wont to say) Down’s syndrome. He suffers from nothing, except anxiety about the Orioles’ lousy start. He is doing nicely, thank you. But he is bound to have quite enough problems dealing with society—receiving rights, let alone empathy. He can do without people like Infant Doe’s parents, and courts like Indiana’s asserting by their actions the principle that people like him are less than fully human. On the evidence, Down’s syndrome citizens have little to learn about being human from the people responsible for the death of Infant Doe.

When Jonathan was born, doctors recommended that Will institutionalize him and expected him to live to be only about twenty. He has now lived over fifty years. He is one of many witnesses to the beauty of promoting a culture of life—the only culture that can act as an antidote to the creeping horrors of the culture of death.

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Trent Horn is a staff apologist at Catholic Answers, the host of The Counsel of Trent podcast, and the author of several books, including Salvation Is from the Catholic Church.

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