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Rick Santorum, one of the current GOP presidential candidates for the 2012 presidential election recently claimed that 10% of deaths in the Netherlands are due to euthanasia and that half of those euthanasia cases are involuntarily. DailyKOS has a video of the American Heartland Forum where this claim was made.

Are these numbers in any way accurate? Is there any hard data on the number of euthanasia cases in the Netherlands?

Mad Scientist
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    [End-of-Life Practices in the Netherlands under the Euthanasia Act](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsa071143) (_The New England Journal of Medicine_) – Oliver_C Feb 21 '12 at 12:24
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    Ugh, this guy is starting to seriously piss me off. **Why** can’t politicians be sued for lying in public? This law needs to be passed. – Konrad Rudolph Feb 21 '12 at 13:19
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    The 10% is open to interpretation (what's included? If you include stopping life support on terminal patients you'd get up much higher than when just including active termination (by injection of lethal doses of painkillers for example), claiming half are involuntary sounds like complete bollox (though it's of course impossible to prove either way). – jwenting Feb 21 '12 at 13:54
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    Factcheck.org has tackled this question. Rather than writing up an answer and taking their references, I'll just link to their answer: http://factcheck.org/2012/02/santorums-bogus-euthanasia-claims/ – Erik Harris Feb 22 '12 at 19:19
  • Just gonna point out here, but *if* that's true it means that either we're euthanizing a lot of people or we've managed to bring down various other causes of death to the point where 'assisted suicide' is statistically significant because you failed to die of anything else earlier. – Shadur Aug 03 '16 at 08:00
  • How in Hell can one undergoes euthanasia involuntarily? – LamaDelRay Apr 19 '19 at 14:02
  • @LamaDelRay Anyone who didn't previously register their wish for euthanasia and is then unable to prevent it by, for example being in a coma, being paralyzed, etc. Or if the request for euthanasia wasn't made when the person was of clear mind. – Martijn Heemels Apr 14 '20 at 16:01
  • @MartijnHeemels that's not involuntary, if the person is unable to make the choice and other do, by the end, it's still a choice. The phrasing made it look like doctors simply straight up chose to euthansiate them, which is not the case here – LamaDelRay Apr 15 '20 at 08:27
  • @LamaDelRay In The Netherlands (I'm Dutch) it's not considered voluntary if the euthanasia choice was made by another person or when the subject didn't have their full wits. This is probably just semantics and English isn't my native tongue so I won't debate the legal definition. Santorum probably didn't even know what exactly he meant. – Martijn Heemels Apr 15 '20 at 12:22

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According to Statistics Netherlands a total of 136,058 people died in the Netherlands in 2010. 3136 of those were euthanasia - that's about 2.3%.

A study found that in 2005, euthanasia accounted for 1.7% of all deaths in the Netherlands (also notable from their numbers, I think, are a decrease in the frequency of "withholding or withdrawing of life-prolonging treatment" from 20.2% before legislation passed to 15.6% in 2005).

That study found that "Ending of life without explicit request by the patient" accounted for 0.4% of deaths, and that in 85.5% of these cases, it was estimated to shorten life by less than one week. This was less than before the legislation allowing euthanasia passed - though not by a statistically significant amount.

Jivlain
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    This statistic is now 6 years old. Which would not be a big deal if the law had been in place for 10 years. I dobut that the numbers have changed to get to 10% but a single year immediately after the law passed does not mean that the numbers have not increased, especially now during a difficult time. 2005 was a boom year economically. – Chad Feb 21 '12 at 13:44
  • true, but the 2010 government report (CBS is the official government statistics office) shows similar numbers. TBH it's impossible to be certain, as doctors may not report all cases of euthanasia to avoid the legal hassle (criminal investigation is mandatory, there's reams of paperwork). – jwenting Feb 21 '12 at 13:52
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    Well, but even if all the unreported cases would amount to 10% that would still mean that Santorum was talking out of his rear end because how would he know that number? – Lagerbaer Feb 22 '12 at 04:50
  • @jwenting: The consequences for not reporting it are high though, so the cost of filling the paperwork is probably worth avoiding the risk of going to jail or losing your license. – Borror0 Feb 23 '12 at 05:28
  • true, but it depends on the risk of getting caught (which is low, probably very low). There are of course no figures about that, because if there were 100% would be caught :) – jwenting Feb 23 '12 at 06:02
  • http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/dutch-puzzled-by-santorums-false-claim-they-practise-forced-euthanasia/ – Oddthinking Feb 25 '12 at 13:00
  • @Borror0 to provide some personal perspective: my father died peacefully 2 years ago this month after nurses and doctors gave him a high dose of morphine to ease his death. He'd refused to take food or water for several days, wanting to die, and they respected that. The death was not reported as euthanasia, though in some countries it no doubt would be deemed to be such. – jwenting Aug 06 '18 at 10:50