Tag Archives: autism

The Slippery Slope

Posted on by

On Thursday, The New York Post reported that doctors in the Netherlands are euthanizing patients with autism or other intellectual disabilities.

The article reports:

Nearly 40 people who identified as autistic or intellectually disabled were legally euthanized in the Netherlands between 2012 and 2021, according to a Kingston University investigation of Dutch euthanasia cases.

Five people younger than 30 who were killed at their own request cited autism as the sole or a major reason for their decision to end their lives, the UK study found.

With those cases, experts have questioned whether the law allowing doctors to kill suicidal patients via lethal injections has strayed too far from its initial intentions when passed in 2002.

Kasper Raus, an ethicist and public health professor at Belgium’s Ghent University, said the types of patients seeking out physician-assisted suicide have changed greatly over the past two decades in both the Netherlands and Belgium, where it is also legal.

The article notes:

In the roughly 10-year period the study focused on, nearly 60,000 people decided to die via euthanasia in the Netherlands, according to the Dutch government’s euthanasia review committee. Of those deaths, the committee has released documents and data on 900 cases in an effort of transparency.

Kingston University researchers looked at those 900 cases and found 39 of them had autism or an intellectual disability. Of the 39, 18 were younger than 50 years old.

Many of the patients cited a number of mental, physical and age-related ailments as the reason for ending their lives — including unbearable loneliness.

Eight people, however, named the sole cause of their suffering as factors related to their intellectual disability — such as social isolation, a lack of coping strategies, an inability to adjust to change or oversensitivity to stimuli.

The article concludes:

Dutch psychiatrist Dr. Bram Sizzo was disturbed by the trend.

“Some of them are almost excited at the prospect of death,” Sizoo said. “They think this will be the end of their problems and the end of their family’s problems.”

In a third of cases, Dutch doctors determined that there was “no prospect of improvement” for people with autism and intellectual disabilities, according to the study.

The director of Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre, Simon Baron-Cohen, worried that people with such disabilities may not fully grasp the decision to end their lives. He called it “abhorrent” that they were not offered more support and were instead euthanized.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is disturbing. It is reminiscent of the road that Hitler marched down that ended with the killing of Jew.

This Is Happening In America

Posted on by

On Tuesday, The City Journal posted an article about a recent event in Seattle, Washington.

This is the story:

Ahmed is a Pakistani immigrant, a faithful Muslim, and until recently, a financial consultant to Seattle’s high-tech sector. But when he reached me by phone in October 2020, he was just one more frightened father. Days earlier, he and his wife had checked their 16-year-old son into Seattle Children’s Hospital for credible threats of suicide. Now, Ahmed was worried that the white coats who had gently admitted his son to their care would refuse to return him.

“They sent an email to us, you know, ‘you should take your ‘daughter’ to the gender clinic,’” he told me.

At first, Ahmed (I have changed names in this essay to protect the identities of minor children) assumed there had been a mistake. He had dropped off a son, Syed, to the hospital, in a terrible state of distress. Now, the email he received from the mental health experts used a new name for that son and claimed he was Ahmed’s daughter. “They were trying to create a customer for their gender clinic . . . and they seemed to absolutely want to push us in that direction,” he said when I spoke to him again this May, recalling the horror of last October. “We had calls with counselors and therapists in the establishment, telling us how important it is for him to change his gender, because that’s the only way he’s going to be better out of this suicidal depressive state.”

The article goes on to explain the the child involved was autistic and during the Covid lockdowns had become fixated on the idea that he might be a girl.

The story continues:

But unlike some other parents I would later speak with, Ahmed’s cool head prevailed. Believing he might be walking into a trap, Ahmed reached out to both a lawyer and a psychiatrist friend he trusted. The psychiatrist gave him advice that he believes saved his son, saying, in Ahmed’s words: “You have to be very, very careful, because if you come across as just even a little bit anti-trans or anything, they’re going to call the Child Protective Services on you and take custody of your kid.” The lawyer told Ahmed the same: “What you want to do is agree with them and take your kid home. When the gender counselors advise you to ‘affirm,’ go along with it. Just say ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay, let’s take him home, and we’ll go to the gender clinic.’”

Ahmed assured Seattle Children’s Hospital that he would take his son to a gender clinic and commence his son’s transition. Instead, he collected his son, quit his job, and moved his family of four out of Washington.

Was Ahmed’s reaction extreme? When I first heard it, back in October 2020, I wondered whether he hadn’t overreacted. But as a growing number of parents began contacting me with similar stories, and I delved into the state laws of Washington, Oregon, and California, I came to a different conclusion. Taken individually, no single law in any state completely strips parents’ rights over the care and mental health treatment of their troubled minor teens. But pieced together, laws in California, Oregon, and Washington place troubled minor teens as young as 13 in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own mental health care—including “gender affirming” care—and renders parents powerless to stop them.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It includes other examples of parents’ rights being trampled to further the transgender movement. This is a degree of government child abuse we have not seen before. Parents need to be very aware of what is being pushed on their children, and parents need to fight it legally to save their children from irreversible decisions that they will very likely come to regret later.