During the Christmas season when many celebrate a unique and miraculous birth, what the late Pope John Paul II called “a culture of death” continues its march.

Last week, the upper house of the Belgian Senate voted to extend a 2002 law legalizing euthanasia for adults so that it includes incurably ill children. The amended law will now have to be voted on by the Parliament’s lower house, a vote expected to take place before elections in May, but if passed, writes the New York Times, children afflicted with “constant and unbearable physical suffering” and “equipped with a capacity for discernment” could then be legally euthanized in Belgium.