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Record W2027966746 · doi:10.1353/hcr.2005.0059

Euthanasia Is Out of Control in The Netherlands

2005· article· en· W2027966746 on OpenAlex
Stephen Drake

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Hastings Center Report · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicEthics and Legal Issues in Pediatric Healthcare
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSpeed limitLawControl (management)TicketAssisted suicidePsychologyPolitical scienceHistoryComputer securityComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Euthanasia Is Out of Control in The Netherlands Stephen Drake (bio) The March 10 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine featured an article by two Dutch doctors defining a "problem" and a "solution." Drs. Verhagen and Sauer announced that a survey had found that, contrary to Dutch law, some infants with severe disabilities have been euthanized. In an effort to end "uncontrolled" euthanasia, they proposed adoption of a set of protocols, known as the "Groningen protocol," for legally euthanizing infants with disabilities and serious medical conditions. It's hard to believe anyone could be surprised by the news of this latest effort to expand the practice of euthanasia in the Netherlands. For the sake of brevity, one might compare Dutch euthanasia practices to a highway system. In this system, drivers are responsible for monitoring their own speed. As long as they tell officials how fast they're driving, the authorities generally won't issue tickets for speeding. Here's the hitch: the problem of speeding has become so problematic that every few years a driver is actually issued a ticket. In every reported case, the offender was given a slap on the wrist, and the speed limit was raised. Predictably, this just results in a general rise in the speed of traffic and further requests to raise the speed limits. This is, in effect, what happened in 1994 when Dr. Boudewijn Chabot was convicted of aiding the suicide of a woman in despair over the death of her two sons. It happened again in 2001 when Dr. Wilfred van Oijen was tried and convicted for "euthanizing" an elderly woman without her permission. The main difference between the Dutch system and the American system, I'd suggest, is one of degree. We've set the speed limits at a lower level and mostly resisted requests to raise them. However, there is significant evidence that at least some medical professionals in the United States would embrace legalization of infanticide based on disability. It wasn't that long ago that passive euthanasia of infants with Downs Syndrome and spina bifida was an accepted practice here, and it's still unclear to what extent the practice persists. The sentiment for facilitating the deaths of infants with disabilities is evident in numerous research studies. For example, in 2001, Streiner and colleagues published a study in Pediatrics comparing the attitudes of parents and health care professionals in "quality of life" assessments of premature infants. The study found that neonatologists and neonatal nurses were both more pessimistic about pediatric outcomes, and also more likely to judge death to be the best outcome, than were the parents or siblings of the same children. This study, conducted in Canada, is consistent with earlier U.S. studies that have demonstrated a bias on the part of medical professionals in devaluing the lives of infants with severe disabilities. No one should mistake this bias for anything other than what it is—an over-valuation of physical and mental norms, which is bigotry. That prejudice is often mistaken for objectivity in bioethics discussions. It's one reason most public discussion of euthanasia is tainted by misinformation. For example, the Associated Press story on the Groningen protocol misinformed readers that the protocol applied to "euthanizing terminally ill newborns." This is a gross distortion: Verhagen and Sauer made no attempt to hide that they were talking about newborns with "serious medical conditions." It's both puzzling and disturbing that this misinformation was met with total silence from the bioethics community. You would think that bioethicists, eager to claim expertise and promising to bring clarity to public debates, would have jumped all over the Associated Press report. This silence reinforces the cynical view that the righteous anger bioethicists express at outspoken disability advocates has less to do with providing clarity than with protecting turf. Bioethicists who appear in popular media often decry the simplistic way in which complex issues are addressed. On behalf of Not Dead Yet and other disability rights organizations, I have a not-so-respectful request: admit your failure to promote a complex and accurate public discussion of bioethical issues and make room for those of us who seem more...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.864
Threshold uncertainty score0.226

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.067
GPT teacher head0.379
Teacher spread0.312 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it