A recent independent study by British researchers of Dutch euthanasia data has found that people with autism and intellectual disabilities have been legally euthanized in the Netherlands, even though they had no physical disease or ailment.
Euthanasia has been legal in the Netherlands since 2002 and the use of the practice has steadily expanded in the last two decades.
According to the Dutch government’s euthanasia review committee, 60,000 people were killed by their doctors between 2012 and 2021. The committee publicly released documents related to more than 900 of those cases to demonstrate how the law was working.
