Wed Nov 17, 2021 – 6:39 pm EST
FLANDERS, Belgium (LifeSiteNews) — A 2021 study of “end-of-life” decisions for “critically ill” Belgian newborns found that 24 infants were given lethal injections over the course of 15 months.
According to the study’s survey of all newborns who died in Flanders, Belgium between September 2016 and December 2017, 61 percent of the deceased infants had an “end-of-life (EOD) decision” preceding their death.
Of those 61 percent of infants, 10 percent were given medication with “explicit life shortening intention.” This contrasts with the 14 percent of infants who were given medication with “possible” life-shortening effect.
For another 12 percent of those infants subjected to EODs, the decision was made to withhold treatment from them. Twenty-five percent of those infants were subjected to the withdrawal of treatment. It’s unclear whether the decision to euthanize the infants was made by physicians, parents, or both.
While euthanasia is legal in Belgium, even for minors in some cases, euthanizing infants is illegal because legal euthanasia requires the minor to be “capable of discernment and conscious at the time of the request for euthanasia,” as the European Institute for Bioethics (EIB) noted.
Bioethics news source BioEdge reported, “Doctors who euthanized newborns with
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