The Dutch know how voluntary euthanasia is practiced in their country, they know that legal euthanasia has improved, rather than harmed, their medical care, and they want the possibility of assistance in dying, if they should want and need it. Isn t that a choice that everyone should have?

One is whether a person has a right to refuse life sustaining medical treatment. The other is whether voluntary euthanasia is ethically defensible.

The Code contains some particularly interesting provisions on abortion, sterilization, in vitro fertilization, eugenics, euthanasia, and the practice of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

As the Post pointed out, there is no such thing as involuntary euthanasia in the Netherlands. The patient s consent is essential, and at least two doctors must agree that the patient s suffering is unbearable and beyond cure.

The Netherlands, in particular, has been subjected to a relentless campaign of vilification. Critics allege that the legalization of voluntary euthanasia has led to a breakdown of trust in the medical profession and all sorts of other dire consequences.

At the same time, native Europeans must learn to accept that Islam may offer new vantage points on such moral issues as euthanasia, abortion, individuality, and solidarity. This way Islam could really become a source of inspiration for the European community of values.

A greater tendency to consume would serve to increase at the same time the inducement to invest. And the low interest rates needed to maintain full employment would lead in time to the euthanasia of the rentier of those who live off the rents of capital.

What was good for our ancestors may not be good today. But insights into the changing moral landscape, in which issues like animal rights, abortion, euthanasia, and international aid have come to the fore, have not come from religion, but from careful reflection on humanity and what we consider a life well lived.

NEW YORK Rick Santorum, a former United States senator seeking the Republican Party s nomination to challenge President Barack Obama this year, has been saying some very strange things about the Netherlands. Ten percent of all deaths in that country, he recently claimed, are from euthanasia, half of which are forced upon helpless patients.

Bennett s decision was also ethical because, as the reference to the country s money suggests, she was not thinking only of herself. Opponents of legal voluntary euthanasia or physician assisted suicide sometimes say that if the laws were changed, patients would feel pressured to end their lives in order to avoid being a burden to others.

So, too, on the other side, did Hans van Delden, a Dutch nursing home physician and bioethicist who for the past 20 years has been involved in all of the major empirical studies of end of life decisions in his country. Peggy Battin, the most prominent American bioethicist working on assisted dying and euthanasia, also took the stand.

There are conflicting views about whether legalization of voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, and of physician assistance in dying in Oregon, has led to an increase in the number of vulnerable people being killed or assisted in dying withouttheirfull, informed consent. For many years, Herbert Hendin, a psychiatrist and suicide expert, has asserted that the safeguards incorporated in these laws fail to protect the vulnerable.

On the No side a disparate coalition drawn from both the far right and the far left, including ultra Catholics and unreconstructed Marxists, has sought to whip up hysteria about supposed threats ranging from military conscription to euthanasia and abortion. But the No side has struggled to find a coherent point of reference and seems to have none of the dynamism and vigor that it projected last time.