The facts
A Dutch doctor actively ended the life of a child who was almost 24 months old. It happened at the end of 2025. It is the first time the Netherlands has used a 2024 rule that lets a physician end the life of a child between 1 and 12. The child could not ask. The parents did.
The review committee published its judgment on Sept. 9, 2026, file LK-2026-001. The child was born on a holiday abroad at 26 weeks and three days, treated in a neonatal intensive care unit there, and moved to the Netherlands at four and a half months. An MRI showed very extensive brain damage, including damage tied to spastic cerebral palsy, and made a cerebral visual impairment very likely. At eight months the child was diagnosed with infantile epileptic spasms syndrome. The seizures continued. At almost two, the committee says, the developmental age was estimated at about six weeks. There was no speech. The prognosis was lifelong dependence for every ordinary daily task, and a high chance of dying young from complications.
The parents asked the doctor to end the child's life, and they did not change their minds. The child could not take part in the decision. One set of independent doctors from outside the treating region agreed the situation would not get better. They also said the suffering was not continuous, and that other options still existed, including palliative care and different drugs. The treating doctor said the suffering was the whole picture, not only the seizures, and that it would still have been unbearable if the epilepsy had been controlled. He tried the medicine those doctors suggested. The side effects got worse. He stopped it. The parents refused a long sedation that would have ended in death from lack of fluid and food. The doctor agreed that was not a reasonable option. A second outside doctor then agreed there was no reasonable way to reduce the suffering except by ending the life.
There is still no professional protocol for how to do this to a child under 12. The doctor looked for one and did not find it. On the parents' wish, he sedated the child through an IV and then gave drugs that put the child into a deep coma. The child died. The committee said he had acted with due care. On Sept. 23, Nieuwsuur reported that the Public Prosecution Service will not charge him.
The doctor told Nieuwsuur he was relieved. He said it felt as if a sword of Damocles had hung over his head for almost a year. He called the option "a kind of emancipation of the child," because adults can request euthanasia and children cannot. He said he hopes the decision gives other parents the nerve to raise it with their own doctor.
When the rule was drawn up, the health minister at the time predicted about five such deaths a year. This is the first. Nieuwsuur says the Netherlands is the first country with a scheme for ending the life of a child in this age group who cannot ask. The ordinary euthanasia boards are a different system. They logged 10,341 reports in 2025, up 3.8 percent, and those deaths were about 6 percent of all deaths in the country. One of those reports was a teenager between 12 and 18. That tally does not include this child.
Our take
The doctor looked at a child who could not talk and called the killing an emancipation.
Adults get a form they can sign. This child got a committee. The first outside doctors said the suffering was not constant and that other roads were still open. The treating doctor did not like that answer, tried a drug, stopped it, and found a second opinion that matched his own. The board read the file and stamped it careful. Prosecutors read the stamp and closed the case. Nobody in that chain had to hear the child say yes. The rule was written for the children who cannot.
He told the country he hopes more parents will now feel safe enough to ask. The relief in that interview is not about this toddler. It is about the next one.
