Germans seek action after healthy woman’s assisted suicide

Praxius

Praxius

Mass'Debater
Dec 18, 2007
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Halifax, NS & Melbourne, VIC
http://www.thechronicleherald.ca/World/1065683.html

BERLIN — Bettina Schardt knew that the combination of drugs she drank in the living room of her home in Wuerzburg last week would kill her, and she died alone.

But this was no ordinary suicide. A German doctor told her just the right formula of antimalarial drugs and tranquilizers she needed to commit suicide painlessly — and he set up a camera to film her death.

The case has set off a firestorm here not only because of the way Dr. Roger Kusch has publicized his role in the death — holding a press conference in which he played snippets of the woman’s last moments — but also because of the motives behind her suicide.

The 79-year-old Schardt was not in chronic pain or suffering from a terminal illness. She was healthy and simply wanted to avoid moving into a nursing home.
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Well that's understandable.... :p

Today, five of Germany’s 16 states plan to push for tighter laws on assisted suicide. They want to make it illegal for companies to profit from teaching people how to kill themselves.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who leads the conservative Christian Democratic Union, told a German television broadcaster Wednesday that she opposes assisted suicide "in whatever form it comes."

But liberal politicians have cautioned against amending suicide laws too quickly.

"No snap decisions," Peter Struck, parliamentary leader for the Social Democrats, said this week. "No immediate laws that then come to nothing."

Suicide is not illegal in Germany, nor is assisting one. But mercy killing and euthanasia carry a heavy stigma here because of Nazi eugenics programs that killed more than 70,000 mentally ill and handicapped people before and during the Second World War.

Kusch, a Hamburg physician and former state justice senator told Schardt how to take enough of the antimalarial drug chloroquine and the tranquilizer diazepam to make her drift into unconsciousness and then arrest her breathing. He did not administer the deadly mixture and broke no law.

He told reporters in Hamburg on Monday that he set up a camera in Schardt’s home and then let her be.

"I said, ‘farewell,’ and then I left," Kusch said. He also showed clips of the tape in which Schardt confirmed that she was ending her life of her own free will.

In a farewell note addressed to Kusch, Schardt assured him that she planned her own death "smilingly and systematically."
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Fair enough.... not really much to debate... she wanted to end her life, the doctor told her how, she did it, she died.... not many people get a chance to control their fate like that and if she had enough of her life and didn't want to spend the rest of it being dependant on a retirement home, then who am I to argue?
 
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