Assisted Suicide in Germany

The New York Times reports that a German activist for assisted suicide filmed himself assist a healthy seventy-nine-year-old woman end her life.

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 . . . .

“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.”

Having been trained as a lawyer, Roger Kusch knew exactly how much he could assist before breaking German laws against euthanasia. But he did this to ignite a debate on assisted suicide, and in that he has succeeded. It turns out, however, that many Germans (their president included) do not want their country to go down the path of Switzerland, whose laws now permit “a bustling trade in assisted suicide.”

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