Re: The Dutch & euthanasia, abortion, drug policy
Ish, I would agree that one does not have to have "religion" in order to have a "value system".
However, I am somewhat surprised that you rate the Dutch so high, in view of their very "liberal" social policies. Or perhaps that is because you think that the highly civilized Dutch can handle them.
Take abortion policy, for example. In the Netherlands, there is state-funded abortion on demand up to the 23rd week (minors must have parental permission). Yet the abortion rate is the lowest in the world (about 1/5 the rate of the US). (This is not counting women from other European countries who go to The Netherlands for abortions.)
Dutch drug policy, based on a harm-reduction approach, is also the most liberal in the Western world. Yet there are about 160 heroin addicts for every 100,000 inhabitants in the Netherlands, compared to about 430 per 100,000 in the United States. In 1995, there were 2.4 drug-related deaths per million inhabitants in the
Netherlands -- the lowest rate in Europe. (In France this figure was 9.5, in Germany 20, in Sweden 23.5 and in Spain 27.1.) The Dutch murder rate is less than a quarter of the U.S. murder rate. And so forth. (These figures were recently supplied by the Dutch in response to some preposterously slanderous remarks about them that US Drug Czar McCaffrey made in an August speech.)
Incidentally, I ran across the following on the practice of euthanasia in the Netherlands. But what is practiced is assisted suicide only, not mercy killing:
Holland (or more properly, the Netherlands) is the only country in the world where euthanasia is openly practiced. It is not allowed by statute, but the law accepts a standard defence from doctors that have adhered to official guidelines. These hinge on voluntariness of the request and unrelievable-ness of the suffering....
Euthanasia is popularly taken to mean any form of termination of life by a doctor. The definition under Dutch law, however, is narrower. It
means the termination of life by a doctor at the express wish of a patient. The request to the doctor must be voluntary, explicit and carefully considered and it must have been made repeatedly. Moreover, the patient's suffering must be unbearable and without any prospect of
improvement. Pain relief administered by a doctor may shorten a patient's life. As is the case in other countries, this is seen as a normal medical decision in terminal care and not as euthanasia.
euthanasia.org
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