Switzerland

Two A-list Hollywood actors will star in a pro-assisted-suicide movie. From the Hollywood Reporter story: George Clooney and Annette Bening will star in In Love, an adaptation of Amy Bloom’s New York Times best-selling memoir In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss that is to be directed by Paul Weitz.… With In Love, Bloom wrote about how she slowly lost her husband to Alzheimer’s, how the two made the decision to travel to Switzerland to end his life, and the struggle to move forward as a widow. The book was an affirmation of love and the power of relationships. It was also named TIME Magazine‘s No. 1 best nonfiction book and included on their list of 100 must-read books. Read More ›

Once we decided that killing is an acceptable answer to suffering, the kind of suffering that qualifies us to be made dead continually expands. Now, an elderly British couple have committed joint assisted suicide at a Swiss termination clinic to avoid future widowhood and increasing fragility — in other words, to eliminate future suffering. From the Daily Record story: A devoted couple who “couldn’t bear to be apart” have died together at a Swiss assisted dying clinic after sending emails to their relatives to let them know. Neither Michael Posner, 97, nor his wife Ruth, 96, had a terminal illness, but had made the decision to die together because they were desperate not to be apart after 75 years of Read More ›

I understand that people are terrified of dementia. Believe me, I get it. My mother died of Alzheimer’s. But I can’t wrap my head around the fact that advocacy for killing/suicide as the answer to the difficulties caused by the condition is becoming ubiquitous. Noted bioethicist and lawyer Thaddeus Mason Pope has written an essay, to be published in an edited volume, on this very issue. It lists eleven ways people can “avoid late-stage dementia,” and almost all involve intentionally ending life. Remember when we were told that advance medical directives are the key to not receiving life-extending treatment one does not want? They are, but that’s not good enough for Pope, because it doesn’t guarantee death: This strategy is Read More ›

Peter Singer, the internationally influential emeritus bioethics professor from Princeton, is known as a moral philosopher — which in his case is an oxymoron. Not only has he repeatedly endorsed the moral propriety of infanticide, but he has also yawned at bestiality and suggested experimenting on cognitively disabled people rather than animals if they are not “persons,” among other ethically depraved opinions. Singer and another philosophy professor — Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek — just took to the opinion pages of the New York Times to endorse geriatric suicide. It seems a noted 90-year-old psychologist named Daniel Kahneman committed assisted suicide last year at one of Switzerland’s death clinics. Kahneman wasn’t seriously ill or debilitated but feared the infirmities that he believed Read More ›

I always enjoy Kathryn Lopez’s ongoing Corner feature in which she posts about news stories that “caught my eye.” So I decided to blatantly steal the concept to discuss euthanasia/assisted suicide stories that have recently been in the news.

1. A Spanish father lost a legal case to prevent his daughter’s euthanasia. The young woman, who has a severe mental illness, tried to commit suicide previously by jumping off a building, leaving her with paraplegia. A court has now decided, in a bitter irony, that due to her disability, doctors can finish what she started. Awful.
2. Euthanasia killings in the Netherlands increased by 10 percent between 2023 and 2024, with nearly 10,000 killed by doctors in one year. Lethal jabs for the mentally ill also increased to 219, and 427 dementia patients. There were also 54 reported cases of simultaneous euthanasia deaths of family members. The report doesn’t say how many of these people were organ-harvested.
3. Nearly 4,000 Belgians were euthanized in 2024. According to the Brussels Times, “The vast majority of patients experienced both physical and psychological suffering (82%). Just under 16% experienced only physical pain and 1.9% psychological suffering.” Belgium was also a euthanasia tourism destination, with 120 people traveling to Belgium from other countries to be killed.

Switzerland is the world’s suicide tourism capital. Indeed, for the price of transportation and about $11,000, you can be helped to make yourself dead at one of the country’s notorious suicide clinics. Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland if not done for a “selfish” purpose and if the soon-to-be-dead person has decisional capacity. (Why charging more than $10,000 to help make one dead isn’t considered “selfish” is beyond me, because it sure ain’t altruistic!) It used to be that each such assisted suicide had to be at least cursorily investigated by the authorities. But now, that minimal protection has been gutted in one canton and the costs of what’s left of oversight passed on to the suicidal deceased. From the Swissinfo.ch story: Read More ›