Wesley Smith writes for National Review Online about a disturbing trend in one European nation.
I still marvel at people who think–even after decades of experience with these laws–that legalizing assisted suicide or euthanasia will remain limited to the few for whom nothing else can be done medically to prevent suffering. Not only is it not true, but it is never intended by euthanasia enthusiasts to be so constrained. Indeed, wherever killing as an answer to suffering is legalized, the numbers so dispatched continually rise, the guidelines expand, and euthanasia or suicide as a means of death becomes societally normalized.
In Belgium, that pattern continues. The Belgian Federal Commission for the Control and Evaluation of Euthanasia just issued a press release about its published euthanasia statistics for 2024–2025. A few observations:
As I perused the statistics, I was struck by how bloodless and stiflingly bureaucratic this killing machine has become. What was it that the philosopher Hanna Arendt said about the banality of evil?
In 2003, there were 259 euthanasia killings. By 2023, there were 3,423, and in 2025, a whopping 4,487, a 31 percent increase from 2023. There will be even more this year, only to be topped every year thereafter going forward. In fact, only during the year of Covid in 2020 did Belgium record fewer euthanasia killings from one year to the next.
In 2024–2025, 75.8 percent of the killings were of patients whose deaths were “within the foreseeable future.” That’s not the same thing at all as terminally ill. The rest — 24.2 percent — of the deaths were of people who were not anywhere near a natural death.
Two of the killings were for minors under age 18. Expect pediatric euthanasia to increase going forward. Once killing is redefined as a medical “treatment,” how do you deny it to children?
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