The Netherlands killed a toddler last year. A government committee reviewed the case and concluded the doctor had acted with "due care."

The child had been born at twenty-six weeks — premature, severely disabled, diagnosed with cerebral palsy, visual impairment, and epileptic seizures that didn't respond to medication. By the time the baby was nearly two years old, doctors assessed the developmental age at six weeks. The committee's own findings noted that "all facets of 'being human'... were severely impaired and were not going to improve."

That phrase — all facets of being human — is doing extraordinary work in a single sentence. It is, functionally, a medical board declaring that a living child did not sufficiently qualify as human to keep alive.

The official language for what came next: "the child was gently put to sleep." That is the phrasing a government reaches for when it needs to describe ending a toddler's life without sounding like it ended a toddler's life.

The body that approved this carries a name so grotesque it reads like satire: the Assessment Committee for Late-Term Abortion and Termination of Life in Newborns and Children Ages 1 to 12. That is the actual name. A standing government committee whose explicit jurisdiction includes deciding whether killing children between their first and twelfth birthdays qualifies as acceptable medicine.

The committee concluded the doctor had "strictly adhered to all due-care requirements." Eduard Verhagen, a pediatric palliative care professor at the University Medical Center Groningen, praised the outcome. "It is good that the committee reached such a well-considered judgment," he said. A toddler is dead and the professor's review is that the paperwork was thorough.

The child could not communicate. Could not ask to die. Could not consent to anything. None of that appears to have changed the committee's answer.

The Dutch government changed its euthanasia regulations in 2024 to permit killing children between the ages of 1 and 12, provided the child is suffering "unbearably" with no prospect of improvement and no reasonable alternative exists. Officials estimated the expanded rules would be used no more than five times per year. This was the first reported case.

That estimate was supposed to be reassuring.

The Netherlands legalized adult euthanasia in 2002. Supporters promised it would stay narrow — terminal adults making a free and informed choice. It didn't stay narrow. It expanded to the elderly with non-terminal conditions, then to people with mental illness, then to newborns under the Groningen Protocol. The 2024 rule change closed the last remaining gap — children aged 1 to 12. There is now an unbroken pipeline from birth to death in which the Dutch state can approve killing at any age, provided the right committee signs the right form.

The people who called this a slippery slope were told they were being hysterical. The Netherlands has spent twenty years proving they weren't.

The Public Prosecution Service will now review the case. The committee's blessing makes the outcome of that review fairly predictable. The infrastructure is already in place — the committee exists, the protocols are written, the professors are praising the thoroughness of the process. The only question left is how quickly this becomes routine.

Five times a year, the officials estimated. One case is already recorded. The committee's next annual report will list it as a single line item in a country that spent twenty years building the administrative capacity to end lives and calling it healthcare.

A baby born too early, damaged in ways medicine couldn't fix, killed by a system that had decided what the answer would be before the committee met. They called it gentle. They called it due care. They put it to sleep.