Last month, 43 year old Prince Johan Friso, the second son of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, was buried by an avalanche in Austria. Prolonged oxygen deprivation has left him brain-damaged, unconscious, and believed to be unlikely to recover. The prince has been working in London as the financial director of a company and his wife and children are therefore based in London.
He is at present being treated in Wellington Hospital, London. While there are clearly practical family reasons for using a London hospital, it must be noted that the Netherlands does not have specialised centres for treating brain-damaged patients over 25. It appears that Dutch doctors do not usually continue to treat patients whom they consider “brain dead”, i.e. permanently neurologically unresponsive, and in a persistent vegetative state, but, as they say, "allow them to die".
Dutch and German media have raised the question of euthanasia, which is of course widespread in Holland, and even of organ donation. However the Dutch royal family are Evangelical Christians and believed to be very unlikely to favour euthanasia for the prince. The head of the German Hospice Foundation said, "The fact that a few days after the accident, the question of euthanasia for Prince Friso is discussed publicly is appalling".
The standard of palliative care in Holland is incomparably poorer than in the UK. Voluntary euthanasia (1.7%), non-voluntary euthanasia (0.4%) and terminal sedation accompanied by withdrawal of nutrition and hydration, now account for nearly one in ten Dutch deaths.
The ProLife Alliance has great sympathy for Prince Friso’s family at this difficult time, and also for all other families in a similar situation. Since the Bland case in 1993 it has been legal in Britain to kill a patient in PVS by withdrawing artificially administered food and water. The diagnosis of PVS has however been widely queried. Patients supposed to be completely unresponsive have been shown to be conscious though unable to react, and others have surprised doctors by recovering a degree of ability. The sheer horror for a patient lying helpless listening to doctors planning his or her death is indescribable.
