VATICAN CITY, NOV. 29, 2000 (ZENIT.org).- The approval by Dutch legislators
of legalized euthanasia "is a sad record for the Netherlands," the Vatican
said today.

In statements to the press, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls
explained that "the approval of a law, which violates the dignity of the
human person and places legislators in opposition to public opinion, is a
sad record for the Netherlands."

On Tuesday [November 28, 2000] the lower house of the Dutch Parliament approved the draft law
104-40 legalizing euthanasia under specific conditions. Approval in the
Senate is considered a formality, and the law is expected to take effect
next year, making the Netherlands the first country to legalize euthanasia.
Under the law, children as young as 12 will be able to request to put to
death, with at least one parent's consent.

Navarro-Valls said that "this law contradicts the 1948 Geneva Declaration
of the World Medical Association, as well as the medical ethical principles
approved by 12 countries of the European Community in 1987."

He continued: "The first problem that the legalization of euthanasia
generates has to do with the conscience of doctors. We are faced again with
a state law that is contrary to the laws of conscience of each one."

Bishop Elio Sgreccia, vice president of the Pontifical Academy for Life,
told Vatican Radio that the Dutch law "in practice abandons the patient at
a moment of desperation."

"It is known that there are always disconsolate moments in acute phases of
pain in life and in those cases there is need to support the person, and
not to abandon him or her, or even accompany him or her to suicide," Bishop
Sgreccia said.

This is why the law represents "an authentic trauma for Europe, a moral
failure," he said. "Today, pain can be controlled; there has been no other
period in the history of medicine in which pain was more easily conquered."

The bishop added: "Statistics have shown that these requests for
anticipated death in fact are requests for help, for assistance, for human
closeness. Those who have overcome this crisis in time have said that they
did not want death administered to them, but simply that someone be closer
to them."
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