A Dutch doctor injected a 16-year-old girl with a lethal drug. It was legal. He went on television to talk about it. Then he did it again. This is not a dystopian novel. This is happening right now, and the same ideology that made it possible is already operating in Canada — and heading straight for a faith-based hospital near you.
Meet the Doctor
Dr. Menno Oosterhoff is a retired Dutch psychiatrist. Between 2023 and 2024, he administered lethal injections to 12 psychiatric patients. The oldest was in his 50s. The youngest were 16 and 17, making them the first minors ever lawfully euthanized for mental illness anywhere on earth.
He did not keep quiet about it. He launched a media campaign, appeared on TV talk shows, published a bestselling book, and co-founded a lobbying group to expand psychiatric euthanasia. One of his cases became a documentary submitted for an International Emmy Award. The tone was sympathetic. He is celebrated in the Netherlands as a moral pioneer.
The Girl Who Was Failed First
One of his patients was raped at 13. She developed PTSD and depression and was placed in an in-patient treatment facility. There, she was reportedly sexually abused again by a fellow patient. The system that was supposed to heal her assaulted her a second time.
After her family found Oosterhoff through his media campaign, he euthanized her.
Nobody fixed the facility. Nobody went to prison. A documentary crew filmed the story and submitted it for an Emmy. The doctor is the hero of that story. The institutions that failed her are not examined. The lethal injection is the happy ending.
“I think, What am I doing? How will the future judge me? I don’t know. I only can say I did what I thought I should do.” — Dr. Oosterhoff, on killing teenagers
The Numbers Are Catastrophic
In the Netherlands, psychiatric euthanasia cases rose from 2 per year in 2011 to 138 in 2023. In 2024, 30 people aged 15 to 29 were euthanized for psychological conditions. That is 3.1 percent of all deaths in that age bracket. Not terminal cancer. Not a car accident. A psychiatric diagnosis.
Research shows that euthanasia requests spike after media coverage of high-profile cases, particularly among young women. The system’s own advocates know this. They keep going.
Canada Is Right Behind Them
Dying With Dignity Canada wants to extend euthanasia to children as young as 12. For 16 and 17-year-olds, they recommend no parental consent required. They call this position “pro-choice.” That word is deliberate. It is borrowed directly from the abortion rights movement, because it is the same argument: bodily autonomy, no exceptions, no institutional objections permitted.
A Canadian parliamentary committee has already recommended extending euthanasia to “competent mature minors.” Seventy-one percent of Canadians support this. The slope is not slippery. It is a conveyor belt.
Now They’re Coming for the Church
In January 2026, Dying With Dignity Canada went to B.C. Supreme Court to force a Catholic hospital to perform euthanasia on its premises. Providence Health Care, a Catholic organization running 18 facilities in Vancouver, transfers patients who request MAID to willing facilities. That is not good enough, the plaintiffs argue.
Their CEO said it plainly: “Conscientious objection is a right held by individuals, but it is not something held by a health-care institution or building.”
Translation: a Catholic hospital’s Catholic identity is legally irrelevant. Accept public funding, surrender your convictions. Become a delivery vehicle for whatever the state decides is medicine this decade. And what the state is deciding, right now, is that a 16-year-old rape survivor’s life was not worth saving.
This Is What the Slope Looks Like
The pro-choice movement said: a woman’s body, her choice. Fine. The same movement now says: a teenager’s body, her choice. And if she chooses death after being failed by every institution around her, a retired doctor with a TV deal will show up and call it dignity.
From legal abortion, to euthanasia for the terminally ill, to euthanasia for the mentally ill, to euthanasia for minors, to compelling religious hospitals to participate. Each step took roughly a decade. Each step was unthinkable until it wasn’t.
The World Psychiatry journal calls the Dutch model an international outlier where a small group of activists has bypassed democratic oversight. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities says it violates international human rights law. These are not right-wing think tanks. These are the system’s own referees, blowing the whistle.
Nobody is listening. The conveyor belt keeps moving. The next stop is America.