First person under age of 12 euthanised in Netherlands
Wednesday, 24 June 2026
A gravely ill child has become the first person under the age of 12 to be euthanised in the Netherlands, a Dutch minister has revealed.
Until two years ago, the country permitted euthanasia only for newborns and people over the age of 12, on condition that they were in a state of intolerable suffering with no realistic hope of relief. Patients under 18 also required the consent of a parent or guardian.
In 2024, however, the Dutch parliament approved a regulation that would allow this to be extended to children under 12 so that they could 'die with dignity' if they had no reasonable path out of their severe pain or distress.
This was despite reservations that children at such a young age might not be fully capable of weighing up such a significant decision.
The mechanism was expected to be applied only in a vanishingly small number of cases each year, as in every instance the doctor must afterwards persuade the authorities that there was no humane and feasible alternative, a very high barrier with young children.
The first such death was recorded by the oversight committee towards the end of last year, Sophie Hermans, the Dutch health minister, disclosed in a letter to parliament.
She divulged no further details about the child's age, name, gender, location or medical condition. The letter was first reported by NOS, the Netherlands' public broadcaster.
Euthanasia under strictly defined conditions was gradually decriminalised by the Dutch courts from the early 1970s and ultimately put on a comprehensive legal footing for adults in 2002.
The law was subsequently expanded to cover 16 and 17-year-olds, with parental consultation, and 12 to 15-year-olds with parental consent.
Today euthanasia accounts for a little over 5 per cent of the deaths recorded in the country.
The Netherlands has not gone quite so far as Belgium, which abolished its lower age limit for euthanasia in 2014. Since then there appear to have been six cases in which Belgian children under the age of 18 were euthanised. They included a nine-year-old with an incurable brain tumour and an 11-year-old with muscular dystrophy.
A bill introduced to legalise the right to die in Britain only applied to terminally ill adults who are mentally competent and assessed as having six months or less to live. Lauren Edwards, MP for Rochester & Strood, has said she will reintroduce the legislation to the Commons in September after the bill ran out of time in the House of Lords earlier this year.