Since assisted suicide was decriminalised in the Netherlands, what was once unthinkable has become normalised – and the attitudes of Catholics, too, are changing

The last time I walked into Amsterdam’s University Medical Centre (UMC), a few kilometres south of the city centre, it was to visit my grandson whose life had just been saved there. So it felt sobering that my visit this week, 12 months on, was to discuss a very different facet of the Dutch health service: not the saving of lives, but the taking of them. The Netherlands became the first country in the world to allow euthanasia, 23 years ago, so now that assisted suicide – or “assisted dying” – seems close to being legalised in Britain, it feels like a good place to go to ask some questions about how it has changed society, how it has affected life for doctors – including those who don’t believe it should be happening – as well as how it has felt to be a campaigner against euthanasia in a place and through a time when that meant taking a stance that was increasingly against the grain.

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