A new report on euthanasia in the Netherlands has revealed that numerous autistic people and people with intellectual disabilities have been euthanized solely because they felt they couldn’t lead “normal” lives.
Irene Tuffrey-Wijne, a palliative care specialist at Britain’s Kingston University, led a study in which she reviewed 900 case files from 2012-2021, and discovered 39 cases that involved autistic or intellectually disabled individuals.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Netherlands had killed a record number of people through euthanasia, 115 of whom had no illness beyond psychiatric issues. Euthanasia is largely unregulated there, allowing people with disabilities and autism to be killed — as Tuffrey-Wijne discovered — despite not being physically ill at all.
In many instances, social issues were mentioned as a cause of suffering. One patient, a woman under age 30, was “unable to make friends and had become isolated, including within her own family.” A gentleman in his 70s was described as never having been able to “keep up with society” and his “autistic traits made it increasingly difficult for him to cope with changes around him.” A male in his 40s was said to be suffering from “anxiety, compulsive complaints and loneliness due to the limitations that arose from ASD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, acquired brain injury, and personality disorder.”
In addition, a man in his 20s was allowed to die because he was lonely and had been bullied as a child. And another woman died because “[s]he suffered from the social isolation that her behaviour had led to. Meetings were disturbed by her shouting. People thought her repulsive and nobody wanted to be near her. She was unable to give her life meaning in any other way”.
Tuffrey-Wijne told the Associated Press that these experiences raised an uncomfortable question.
“There’s no doubt in my mind these people were suffering,” Tuffrey-Wijne said. “But is society really OK with sending this message, that there’s no other way to help them and it’s just better to be dead?”
In a third of the cases reviewed, people with autism and intellectual disabilities were seen as “untreatable” and there was no hope of improving the patients’ lives. Therefore, they were euthanized, without being offered further support or resources, which Simon Baron-Cohen, director of Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre, told the Associated Press was “abhorrent.”
Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, added, “Helping people with autism and intellectual disabilities to die is essentially eugenics.”
