Escaping the ‘unprepared generation’ trap: discussions about euthanasia after a ‘completed life’ in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

This article analyses discussions in the Netherlands about extending the current euthanasia legislation to include older people who are tired of living and want to end life without being sick or suffering unbearable pain. We look at these discussion from a generational perspective: the present generation of older people has learned from the experiences of the previous generation that life may last longer than they want and it might be challenging to die in a humane way. First, we briefly sketch the processes that led to the present call for euthanasia on the basis of ‘completed life’ and disentangle the meaning of ‘completed life’ in the existing literature. We then present the results of our qualitative research consisting of interviews with nine people who signed a petition in support of ‘completed life’ euthanasia and analyse their arguments and opinions in the context of a historical timeframe and personal biographies. We then elaborate on individual expectations regarding the enactment of ‘completed life’ euthanasia legislation. We analyse the intertwinement of the respondents’ experiences with other people’s end of life struggles and their personal end-of-life expectations from the perspective of being or not being prepared for the trap of living ‘too long’.

KEYWORDS:

• Completed life euthanasia
• fatigue
• loss of autonomy
• unwanted dependency
• unprepared generation trap
• self-euthanasia

Acknowledgments

We thank the respondents for their participation in the research, Els van Wijngaarden for her comments, and Zoe Goldstein for final editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There is, however, the curious and confusing custom that the articles have multiple authors, whereas the thesis (the total of all articles) has only one author.

2. For a detailed overview of the processes that led to the Dutch euthanasia legislation and the Of Free Will petition between 1858 (!) and 2016, see: (Van Wijngaarden, 2016a, pp. 18–28).

3. The interviewer (first author) is English speaking.

4. Cf. Pool and De Groot (oral communication), mentioned before, who described the signatories as ‘slightly elitist’.

5. For extensive discussions on methodological and emotional aspects of doing research about death and dying see among others: (Glaser & Strauss, 1965; Van Wijngaarden, 2016a; Visser, 2017; Woodthorpe, 2009).

6. For reasons of anonymity, the respondents are indicted by their code number. Some of the quotes in this article have been slightly edited to make them clearer. The contents were not affected.

7. Another aspect of a patient’s dependence on his or her doctor is the doctor’s right to refuse to perform euthanasia if he/she has ethical or religious objections. For a juridical discussion of this additional complication, see (Malpas & Owens, 2016).

8. Lemos-Dekker (2018) writes that Dutch family members welcomed the death of a loved one with dementia as a form of care.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Priya Satalkar

Priya Satalkar is trained in Medicine, Public Health, Medical Anthropology and Bioethics. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Biomedical Ethics at the University of Basel, Switzerland. This article is built on the research she conducted for her thesis during the Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Bioethics.

Sjaak van der Geest

Sjaak van der Geest is emeritus professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He conducted fieldwork in Ghana and Cameroon and published books and articles on marriage and kinship and various topics in medical anthropology, including the cultural context of pharmaceuticals in non-Western communities, reproductive health, hospital ethnography, death and dying, perceptions of sanitation and waste management, and social and cultural meanings of care and old age in Ghana.