Rick Santorum was a speaker at the American Heartland Forum in Columbia, Mo., Feb. 3. He chose to speak on euthanasia in the Netherlands. He said:
“ . . . In the Netherlands, people wear different bracelets if they are elderly. And one bracelet says: ‘Do not euthanize me.’ Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands but half of the people who are euthanized — 10 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands — half of those people are euthanized involuntarily at hospitals because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country, because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, they will not come out of that hospital if they go in there with sickness.”
Outrageous, you say. It would, indeed, be an outrage if there were an ounce of truth in it. But there isn’t. It is all a fabrication.
Santorum’s remarks spawned headlines in Holland: “Rick Santorum Thinks He Knows the Netherlands: Murder of the Elderly on a Grand Scale.” The uproar prompted an investigation. Fact checker, Glenn Kessler, went to work. He discovered the Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia in 2001, setting forth a complex process. The law codified a practice that had been unofficially tolerated for many years. Under Dutch law, a doctor must diagnose the illness as incurable and the patient must have full control of his or her mental faculties. The patient must voluntarily and repeatedly request the procedure and another doctor must provide a written opinion agreeing with the diagnosis.
Nevertheless, the fact-checker wrote, statistics show it is still a relatively uncommon form of death. In 2010, the number of euthanasia cases reported to one of the five special commissions was 3,136. This was a 19 percent increase over 2009, and amounted to 2.3 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands in 2010. More than 80 percent were suffering from cancer and almost 80 percent died at home, not in the hospital.
So how about the bracelets? They simply don’t exist. The closest thing to them are the living wills which the Dutch, along with a great many Americans, prepare and sign. The documents express the person’s desires for end-of-life treatment. Allen County Hospital routinely asks patients to have a living will on file.
Mr. Kessler, who by coincidence is the son of Dutch immigrants to the U.S., was unable to find any evidence backing up any of Santorum’s claims. The whole story was made up from whole cloth —a tissue of lies.
THIS MAN WANTS to be President of the United States. Yet he has no respect for the truth. The accusations he made about the Netherlands and the Dutch people were as vicious as they were false. They were so outrageous in their implications — imagine a modern nation in which hospitals routinely murder elderly patients! — that any decent person would make absolutely certain of their truth before repeating them in a public forum. Santorum obviously made no such effort.
Santorum’s hatred of euthanasia is so intense, and the lies about Holland fit his prejudices so perfectly, that he gave thanks for the calumny and proceeded to spread it around the globe.
Now imagine him as president, the person who sets the tone for how the United States of America deals with its allies, such as The Netherlands, and every other nation around the globe.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
