Assisted Suicide of Healthy 79-Year-Old Raises Right to Die Issues

The story, out of Germany, on the assisted suicide of Bettina Schardt is deeply sad. Schardt was 79 years-old, but not sick, when Roger Kusch helped her die:

When Roger Kusch helped Bettina Schardt kill herself at home on Saturday, the grim, carefully choreographed ritual was like that in many cases of assisted suicide, with one exception.

Ms. Schardt, 79, a retired X-ray technician from the Bavarian city of Würzburg, was neither sick nor dying. She simply did not want to move into a nursing home, and rather than face that prospect, she asked Mr. Kusch, a prominent German campaigner for assisted suicide, for a way out.

Her last words, after swallowing a deadly cocktail of the antimalaria drug chloroquine and the sedative diazepam, were “auf Wiedersehen,” Mr. Kusch recounted at a news conference on Monday.

It was hardly the last word on her case, however. Ms. Schardt’s suicide — and Mr. Kusch’s energetic publicizing of it — have set off a national furor over the limits on the right to die, in a country that has struggled with this issue more than most because of the Nazi’s euthanizing of at least 100,000 mentally disabled and incurably ill people.

“What Mr. Kusch did was particularly awful,” Beate Merk, the justice minister of Bavaria, said in an interview. “This woman had nothing wrong other than her fear. He didn’t offer her any other options.”

Germany’s conservative chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared on a German news channel on Wednesday, “I am absolutely against any form of assisted suicide, in whatever guise it comes.”

Read the whole thing, at the link.

Related: It turns out that Switzerland has liberalized laws on euthanasia, and demand for assisted suicides has taken off in that country.

Question for Readers: Is the European model of assisted suicides appropriate for the United States (recall that the Supreme Court upheld Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, "which allows terminally-ill Oregonians to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of lethal medications")?

Photo Credit: New York Times