Mark September 2026 as a month when we are learning where Western culture’s uneasy conscience stands on the question of human dignity.
On September 9, a Dutch oversight committee released a report on the first euthanasia case of a child from age one to twelve in the Netherlands, where laws were recently revised to allow for such actions under strict protocols. The child who was put to death was nearly two years of age. Born prematurely, the child suffered severe brain damage, had cerebral palsy, epileptic seizures, could not speak, and had mucus inhibiting its breathing. The child was deemed to be experiencing profound suffering, and his condition, we are told, was hopeless. Obviously, this story pulls at our heartstrings, as the sight of a suffering child is nearly unconscionable.
But does suffering mean a child should be killed? Does profound suffering mean palliative care is futile? Does present suffering foreclose the possibility of medical developments that could someday aid the child’s life? In this situation, parents and physicians acted as surrogate decision-makers and decided to end the child’s life. Though it does not blunt the news that a child was legally killed, news reports do indicate that the decision was not reached haphazardly. A Dutch government report concluded that the situation was handled with appropriate safeguards and requisite care.
Then, on September 11, the British House of Commons voted down a reintroduced bill to legalize assisted dying, 286 to 270. This welcome news reverses earlier support from its first reading in June 2025, where 314 Members of Parliament supported it.
So, there’s bad news coming out of the Netherlands and good news, for now, coming out of England. Both events coming two days apart demonstrate the moral schizophrenia happening on the European continent. But let’s be clear on the moral terms of what the West is now staring down in these situations.
In the Netherlands, what stands out is that the child killed at the hands of the state could not consent. In modern bioethics, consent is arguably the most important principle in medicine — an idea born of “autonomy,” the idea that any action undertaken on a patient by a physician is voluntary and self-chosen. In other countries where euthanasia or assisted dying is legal, the choice to end one’s life is the product of autonomy. The Netherlands, in what is a massive blow to the moral architecture of Western medicine, has undermined one of the key principles undergirding modern bioethics. Autonomy was folded into third-party assessment, assessors who we can never be sure have the best interests of the patient at stake, especially in bloated nationalized healthcare systems that rely upon rationing.
Again, this represents a moral earthquake, as decisions about life and death — and who has dignity and who does not — are delegated to third parties. As I mentioned above, the child could neither assent to nor refuse what was given to them. He or she could not speak up for themselves (we do not know if it was a boy or a girl). That is worth pausing and reflecting on. Whether the child would have wanted to have died as an adult, we will never know. Whether the child could have grown and found a way to witness to the profound dignity of human life even amid suffering, we’ll never know. Moreover, consider another morally relevant factor: The child was not actively dying. This was a disability, not a terminal diagnosis as in other situations of euthanasia. Traditional justifications require a terminal diagnosis, but the Netherlands’ actions create a new standard: From terminal diagnosis to hopeless and unbearable suffering (a threshold that is itself rather subjectively defined).
We can look at what the Netherlands did and condemn it, but we should also pay attention to the deadly logic at play. Once the legal line is broken that says life may not be taken except in situations of moral wrongdoing, taking life for additional reasons expands. It’s simple logic, and it has happened everywhere assisted suicide laws are passed.
What began with tight regulations in 2002, when assisted dying was first legalized in the Netherlands, has now expanded into children being killed at the hands of the state, all under the guise of compassion.
And this brings us to the precipice that the United Kingdom is peering over. We must be thankful for the moral courage that led former supporters of the U.K.’s assisted dying bill to reverse course. But vigilance is now the moral watchword. Supporters of the bill are pledging their insistence on continuing the fight for assisted suicide. Were the U.K. to adopt assisted suicide, even under the promises of stringent controls to prevent the assisted suicide crisis now engulfing Canada, the Dutch case foreshadows what happens to a country 24 years later once time and worldviews continue to evolve — especially secular ones that lack a comprehensive dignity ethic born of Christian theology’s emphasis on humans being made in God’s image. What the Netherlands legalized in 2002 had tighter controls than what Britain was proposing, and look where that got them once the moral logic had time to bake. To those in the U.K.: take note. Western medicine is continuing its secular free-fall, with nothing to catch it aside from further dread.
When society grants that some lives are no longer worth living, all that’s left are procedural protections to lessen — but not prevent — moral catastrophe. Perhaps consent will suffice for a time, but the Netherlands reveals that consent is no safe harbor, either. Consent is no permanent moral firewall when emotional appeals are made to lessen suffering, whether it be the disabled, the demented, or a two-year-old.
As always, the moral terms are stark: Either the human being is a bearer of intrinsic, immeasurable worth, or it is not. That truth follows from its nature, not its function. If that sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve swallowed Christian assumptions about the human person. But can the human person survive the secular winter? Either the law will presume to protect life, or it will create cascading justifications for its elimination. Either dignity is innate, or it is ascribed by a committee. If dignity is innate, then the purpose of law is to protect and preserve life — never to take it. Medicine is meant to heal and comfort, not eliminate the sufferers. But with the onslaught of secular medicine — an approach to medicine that explicitly rejects any transcendent worth of the human being — all that’s necessary to embrace the deadly logic of assisted suicide is to let the argument play out. As a Canadian physician was quoted in a 2025 Atlantic article, “Once you accept that people ought to have autonomy, and once you accept that life is not sacred and something that can only be taken by God, a being I don’t believe in, then if you’re in that work, some of us have to go forward and say, we’ll do it.”
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Andrew T. Walker, Ph.D., is Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology. He is a Fellow with The Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. You can follow him on X: @AndrewTWalker.
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