NY Daily News: A 24-year-old Belgian woman who suffers from depression and has had a “death wish” since childhood has been granted the right to die — even though she’s not terminally ill.
Doctors gave the young woman, identified only as Laura, the go-ahead to be euthanized by lethal injection after she spent her life battling suicidal thoughts, she told Belgian newspaper De Morgen.
“Life, that’s not for me,” she said. “Death feels to me not as a choice. If I had a choice, I would choose a bearable life, but I have done everything and that was unsuccessful.”
Laura, who entered a psychiatric institution when she was 21, said her alcohol father and troubled childhood contributed to her longtime “death wish.”
“I played all my life with these thoughts of suicide, I have also done a few attempts,” she said. “But then there is someone who needs me, and I don’t want to hurt anyone. That has always stopped me.”
Laura is now planning her funeral and final words to loved ones, De Morgen reported. “What I’m going to say on that last moment, I do not know yet,” Laura said. “I have extensively written ideas in letters to my friends. I think everything has already been appointed.
“Maybe I will finally figure it out with these words: ‘Those who are about to die salute you.'”
Belgium, which legalized euthanasia in 2002, gave the physically healthy woman the green light to end her life as a terminally ill California mother sues the state for the same permissions.
Christy O’Donnell, 46, who suffers from stage IV lung cancer, has less than four months left to live but fears an agonizing death that will feel like drowning.
She follows in the footsteps of Brittany Maynard, a cancer-stricken California woman who led the “death with dignity movement” and moved to Oregon to legally take her own life with prescription drugs last November.
See also:
- Belgium’s culture of death: Thousands are euthanized without their consent
- Belgium’s culture of death: Doctor Kills Depressed Woman in Euthanasia, Doesn’t Tell Family Until Next Day
- Five people killed EVERY DAY by assisted suicide in Belgium as euthanasia cases soar by 25 per cent in last year alone
- Belgium considering new euthanasia law FOR KIDS
DCG
