Professor Theo Boer:

I thank Deputy Daly for the questions. In response to my colleague, Mr. Luley, I think it has become clear that I believe killing is always an emergency. I would not present it as one of several options. That is what is taking place in the Netherlands now and, as I said, in some regions and districts it accounts for one in five deaths. I would say killing is not a preferred option and I think we should have the liberty, with all due respect, to have this presumption in favour of not killing and to have that as a basis of society. That is somewhat critical of my colleague from Switzerland.

Now for Deputy Daly's questions. What is a volunteer?

By "volunteer", we mean people who, for no money or personal interest, visit the patient at home, make them coffee, shower them and so on. Volunteers are often people who are very close to the patient or elderly person in their own circumstances and who prevent them from having to be admitted to hospital and enter the alienating system of healthcare, with its white robes and various instruments. In smaller places such as villages, the number of volunteers is much higher than in the more anonymous urban areas.

As for goosebumps, I get goosebumps when I hear about the scarcity of medical resources for this demographic and so on. I would be the first to recognise that it is our societal duty to enhance and support the lives of those people, which is why, along with my mother, I took care of my grandmother for two years when she had dementia. Nevertheless, there is a degree of misunderstanding here. Not all suffering or misery is manageable. As the German-speaking Mr. Minelli and Mr. Luley will understand, my neighbour in Germany said, "Ach Herr Boer, man muss das Leben nehmen so wie es kommt", or we should take life as it comes. She said that towards the end of a life in which she had lost her husband and children. She had been bombed out by the Russians and so on. She had this enormous resolve to survive whatever the circumstances might be, but I think we are now entering a society - this is the cultural problem - in which death is increasingly seen as a remedy for all kinds of unbearable suffering. That is what worries me because, in the end, it will also affect me. I am now 63 and I expect that my life may at some point become very miserable, but I do not want to live in a country where children say to their father or grandfather that they have an option to end their life. I think we very much agree on that but - excuse me for using this phrase in a parliamentary committee - shit happens. Life can be very difficult and we cannot manage all suffering.

On the issue of changing one's mind, patients have an advance directive, and I think that in about half the cases, they kind of operationalise those advance directives in the form of a direct request to their doctor where they ask him or her to set in motion the euthanasia procedure at that point. Of that 50% who ask for euthanasia, I estimate that about 70% of those requests are carried out, while 30% are either refused or are no longer necessary because the patient dies before it could be carried out.