When it first came into force on 1 April 2002, the Netherlands’ euthanasia law permitted physicians to end a patient’s life without criminal liability. This would be provided that the patient was either a newborn baby or over 12 years old, and was deemed to be unbearably suffering with no prospect of improvement.

Just 23 short years later, the first child under the age of 12 has been euthanized in the Netherlands, according to revelations from the nation’s Health Minister, Sophie Hermans this week. The law was changed to allow for this two years ago, following suit from its neighbor, Belgium, which became the first country to provide euthanasia for children of any age.

Everywhere that euthanasia or assisted suicide has been made legal, attempts to expand the eligibility of the law have rapidly been made. Many of them have been successful.

In Canada, euthanasia and assisted suicide were made legal in 2016 for people whose death was deemed to be reasonably foreseeable. Just 10 years and 100,000 deaths later, the law is nothing like what it originally was. In 2021, only five years after the law came into force, the requirement that an individual’s death was to be “reasonably foreseeable” was repealed. Less than a year from now, in March 2027, it could become legal for people to end their lives solely for reasons regarding their mental health.

Now, there are discussions in Canada for the law to be expanded to allow for the euthanasia of newborn babies. The Quebec College of Physicians claim that the euthanasia of newborns with “deformations” or “medical syndromes” may constitute an “appropriate treatment”. The expansion of such laws is the logical endpoint of legislation that uses arbitrary eligibility criteria and malleable terminology to decide who qualifies to end their lives.

It is precisely this vague terminology that so many people who are concerned about the assisted suicide bill in England and Wales take issue with. The bill, which was brought back to parliament in May after being previously not making it past the Lords, restricts eligibility to adults who are deemed to be terminally ill, with a prognosis of six months or less. Already, this law is more lax than those in other nations, as suffering itself is not a prerequisite; the physician’s guess is the key defining criterion.

Speaking during the bill’s Third Reading in the House of Commons, then-sponsor of the bill, Kim Leadbeater, said that under the legislation, “only terminally ill patients who are eligible under the strict criteria and want to access assisted dying can do so”. Even if this were the case — which countless MPs, Peers, and experts elsewhere have explained is not — it would only be so until the inevitable campaign to expand the law occurred.

This is not a hypothetical slippery slope. Assisted suicide lobby group My Death, My Decision plainly states on its website that those in the organization “do not believe that there is a strong moral case to limit this option solely to those with six months left to live”, arguing that “life expectancy in and of itself says nothing” about the extent of an individual’s suffering. Humanists UK, another prominent lobby group, responded to the introduction of Leadbeater’s bill by arguing that an assisted suicide law should also be for “those who are suffering intolerably from incurable conditions which may not be terminal”.

Both critics and supporters of the reincarnated assisted suicide bill are sick to death of it; debate around it dragged on for 18 months before running out of time in the Lords, and it threatens to drag on again, too, with neither side seeming likely to concede any ground. It will have its second reading in the House of Commons, for the second time, on 11 September. MPs and the wider public should be aware that a vote for the bill is inevitably a vote to open the door to the further expansion of the law, as has been the case elsewhere, and as the lobby groups themselves desire. This tragedy in the making must be ended now, before it is too late.