Switzerland About to Permit Nursing Home Assisted Suicides

As if the suicide clinics weren’t bad enough, now nursing homes in one area of Switzerland will soon be allowed to facilitate suicides by residents.  From the story:

A Swiss region is poised to give old people in state-subsidised care homes the right to die via assisted suicide if that is their wish. The assisted suicide organisation Exit, which already helps terminally ill patients in a number of nursing homes, forced a poll on the issue in Vaud – a Swiss first – back in 2009 and garnered the required number of signatures to make it law. Now there will be one more referendum to decide if the local government’s proposals, which slightly water down the Exit plans, become law…

The proposed bill would enable euthanasia only under strictly determined conditions,’ the government of the Swiss canton Vaud wrote in a communique. These conditions include that the person who wants an assisted death has to be suffering from a severe and incurable disease and “have uttered his or her dying wish several times over a period of time. Moreover the patient has to be mentally able to judge his or her situation realisticly, and have had holistic treatment of their condition proposed to them.”

Suicides in such locales  can be very painful—and frightening—to other residents:

Jérôme Azau, director of Lausanne’s Foundation Mont-Calme nursing home, thinks the idea of a public initiative to decide such an issue is ‘disgraceful’…’It sends a message to young people that they can simply commit suicide when they get older. It’s unacceptable.’ Azau recounted a ‘traumatic’ assistance-to-suicide experience at the Mont-Calme nursing home several years ago. ‘It went badly,’ he said. ‘It was a very difficult experience for the other residents who had contact with this person and talked to her every day.’

So, let’s sum up:  Switzerland permits suicide tourism, a lot of money to be made off of suicide by at least one clinic, d haa constitutional right declared by the supreme court for the mentally ill to have assisted suicide, and voters deciding to push the elderly out the door legalizing assisted suicide in nursing homes, which could easily add to the despair sometimes seen in such places.  And even that will not be enough.

Culture of death, Wesley?  What culture of death?

Update: This from a trusted source: “It could happen, of course, but I think that the Daily Mail reporter based (plagiarised) his report on a 2008 story
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/Home/Archive/Vaud_debates_assisted_suicide_in_nursing_homes.html?cid=6968640
This measure might have been passed in the meantime, and things might even be worse than he predicts, but I don’t have a lot of confidence in the timeliness of the report.”