Dutch authorities said they expected the law to spur similar campaigns elsewhere. Belgium and Spain also were considering such laws, it said. The bill passed through the lower house by an even larger margin last November. It becomes law after it is signed by Queen Beatrix and published in legal documents, probably within a few weeks. Before the bill was adopted, doctors conducted an estimated 5,000 mercy killings a year in the Netherlands, but only a handful have been prosecuted in recent years for misconduct.
Surveys show that doctors refuse far more requests to assist suicides than they accept.
As the upper house debated the bill, about 10,000 anti-euthanasia activists gathered outside the legislature in a final show of dissent. They will realize they have made a terrible mistake. Despite the unusually large protest, Borst said some 90 percent of the population backed the changes. An editorial in the Amsterdam daily Trouw said public opinion was still too divided to speak of a consensus. The Dutch Ministers of Justice Benk Korthals, standing center, and of Health, Els Borst, left, defend the new law on euthanasia in the upper house of Parliament in The Hague, Tuesday April 10, 2001.