This year, the Belgian government legalised euthanasia for minors with incurable diseases in a move described by one senior politician as ‘the ultimate gesture of humanity’. While its advocates have been careful to emphasise that the policy is intended only for children in extreme circumstances, requiring parental consent and psychiatric assessment, some commentators have expressed concern about its implementation in the wake of several controversial instances of adults receiving voluntary euthanasia to alleviate severe emotional distress, rather than terminal physical suffering. Yet despite the international controversy such measures generate, right-to-die campaigners counter that such policies have support among the general population and across several European neighbours, including the Netherlands and Luxembourg (where the lower age limit is 12), and that the number of adults seeking such services is steadily growing: a recent Dutch petition called for access to be granted to those over 70 who are ‘tired of life’.

Right-to-die campaigners in the UK emphasise that such euthanasia-on-demand legislation differs vastly from calls for assisted dying. They stress that the measures proposed in Lord Falconer’s proposed Assisted Dying Bill closely follow the model tried in tested in Oregon, with strict legal safeguards to ensure that assisted dying is available only as a humane last resort to adults facing immediate suffering from terminal illness. Yet opponents contend that there is no obvious reason why the UK is any more likely to follow the US rather than a European model in the future. It is argued for some that a growing cultural demand for ‘a good death’ can only lead to further extensions of assisted dying to those, young or old, facing a broad category of profound mental and physical anguish.

Are highly liberal attitudes to voluntary euthanasia in the Benelux a culturally specific exception, or a slippery slope once assisted dying is given official validation? If we view assisted dying as a humane act to give certain patients autonomy in the face of debilitating illness, on what basis do we draw distinctions between physical and mental pain? Where do we set the age of responsibility? How much can we learn from differing cultural attitudes to dying and the medical establishment in countries which already offer some form of euthanasia?