Canada’s increasingly enthusiastic embrace of euthanasia has received most of the attention lately, but the Dutch also continue to blaze a path to the lethal practice’s normalization. Here are the latest concerning statistics, as reported by DutchNews:

The Dutch demonstrate that once killing becomes an acceptable means of eliminating suffering, the numbers of people who die by euthanasia steadily increases — as do the acceptable causes of suffering used to justify killing. Indeed, eventually, euthanasia will encompass the terminally ill, the chronically ill, people with disabilities, psychiatric patients, ill children, and disabled babies — ultimately leading to death on demand (as it has already come to in Germany, after that country’s highest court created a right to a “self-determined death“).

It should be clear by now that it isn’t a matter of whether there will be a “slippery slope,” but of how long the slide will take. That’s the debate we should be having, not whether doctor-hastened death will be limited to the terminally ill. Because logically it can’t be, and ultimately, it won’t be.