In the letter, Hermans revealed that a child with “severe illness” died from euthanasia at the end of 2025, Dutch News reports. The report did not include any personal details about the child or his or her medical condition.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Netherlands and other pro-life advocates have spoken out about the “slippery slope” of continuing to expand the criteria for assisted suicide. In a 2017 interview, Cardinal Willem Eijk of Utrecht said:
The Dutch bishops’ conference has warned from the beginning against violating the intrinsic dignity of human life through euthanasia or assisted suicide, because it is never ever allowable to violate intrinsic values, and because in doing so you put yourself on a slippery slope… Was it not naive, when [this] started in the 1990s, to suppose that ending life for psychiatric disorders would remain limited to a few cases only?
In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide. The country expanded euthanasia and assisted suicide to allow children under the age of 12 to be euthanized if the child is “terminally ill and is suffering unbearably with no prospect of improvement.”
More information can be found on Aleteia here. Read more about euthanasia and assisted suicide in the February 2026 MCC Messenger.