Nobody would deny that the situation was tragic.
The toddler — whose name and sex are not disclosed in the official government report (this article will use masculine pronouns for simplicity) — was clearly suffering. Born extremely prematurely, he’d suffered several rounds of sepsis and had been left with damage to the brain’s white matter (periventricular leukomalacia), spastic cerebral palsy, and severe visual limitations. By the time he was eight months old, he’d developed infantile epileptic spasms syndrome (IESS) and was experiencing severe seizures several times a day. Understandably, he struggled to sleep as his lungs filled with fluid, making eating, swallowing, and breathing difficult.
The drugs he was on seemed to do almost nothing, and at nearly 24 months old, the child was just hitting the developmental milestones of your average six-week-old newborn.
The whole thing sounds like a nightmare to any parent. Watching your child suffer endlessly while you sit helplessly on the sidelines is an experience no one would wish on his worst enemy. At some point, all anyone wants is for the whole horrible thing to come to a merciful end. And so this Dutch toddler’s parents asked their child’s doctor to kill him.
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