We remove the taboo on assisted dying at our peril
On Monday, in a remote forest on the Swiss-German border, a surreal scene played out. A gleaming blue and white capsule, stands poised and waiting, looking like a rocket about to take off. A 64 year old woman is sealed within the device, gazing out from behind a transparent window. She presses a button within the machine, and it gradually fills with nitrogen gas. Her breathing slows, her eyes close. She is dead.
The woman, still unnamed, is the first person to die via the “Sarco suicide pod”. A photographer was on hand to capture the moment, and two people who assisted in the death have been arrested by the Swiss police.
But what they have been arrested for is not so clear. In Switzerland, assisting a suicide is not a crime. Already, people come from across the world to end their lives with the assistance of Swiss clinics, including hundreds of British nationals. By some estimates, someone in Britain goes to die in Switzerland every week.
Support for legalising euthanasia in the UK is high. According to a 2020 YouGov poll, as much as 61 per cent of the population support legalisation. However, as Monday’s news illustrates, our debate has lagged far behind the global pace of technological and social change.
In the mind of most Britons, thanks to the highly effective messaging of British pro-euthanasia groups, assisted dying is seen as merely a last resort for people living with extreme pain, carefully monitored and regulated by doctors and psychologists.
Belief in the medical profession and the NHS is one of the few areas where we still have faith in institutions. People trust their doctors with life and death decisions already, and they don’t want to see friends and relatives suffer needlessly. But take away the institutional control, and support for euthanasia plummets. Whilst 65 per cent of those surveyed trusted the NHS to assist in deaths, only 39 per cent trusted private companies to do so.
The idea of a highly limited, heavily regulated option for those in extreme pain sounds plausible to many people, but this isn’t what awaits us if we drop the shield of anti-assisted suicide laws.
The Sarco suicide pod was invented by the Australian, now Netherlands-based, “Dr” Philip Nitschke (who has lost his medical licence, but holds a doctorate), and is only the latest in a series of innovations in suicide he has developed over the years.
These include such inventions as the “exit bag” (a plastic bag with a drawstring) and the “Co-Genie” (a gas mask that pumps carbon monoxide into your lungs).
The pod is a marked technical improvement over sticking a bag over your head, and Nitschke boasts that one can now die whilst gazing at whatever attractive vista one pleases, giving you a nice view as the poison gas fills your plastic sarcophagus.
What all of his endeavours have in common is making it possible for individuals to take their own lives without the intervention of doctors, or the oversight of the law. Nitschke wants, he says, to “de-medicalise death”. He has written a freely available online “how-to” guide, which I will not name, to assist people in commiting suicide.
One of the suicide drugs he recommends (which I will also not be naming), has been linked to 14 deaths in Australia of young people under the age of 40 since 2010. There are at least two attested cases of healthy young men killing themselves using information provided by Nitschke and one of his organisations.
In the case of one of them, who ticked a box declaring himself over 50 to access the suicide handbook, “Dr” Nitschke branded the dead young man “a liar” and claimed he bore no responsibility for the death.
Nitschke, like many advocates for euthanasia, believes that suicide is a universal right, one not limited to those in extreme pain. He says that there are legitimate “social” reasons to seek death, a perspective shared by many British advocates of the cause, such as Matthew Parris, who has written that “useless lives should end”, following a “Darwinian” logic. Already, in the Netherlands where Nitschke is based, numerous patients have sought and obtained suicide for psychological and social reasons.
And when there is no law against assisting suicide, it will prove impossible to stop the proliferation of suicide technology. Already, the Swiss authorities have been left feebly complaining merely that the suicide pod “does not meet the requirements of product safety”.
How many of us know people who have self-harmed? Or attempted suicide? People who are still here today because they failed, because they got help? In the world of “Dr” Nitschke, certain death would only be a few clicks away for the depressed, bereaved and isolated. In the Netherlands, assisted suicide has already become one of the leading causes of death, with 1 in every 20 deaths brought about by medical intervention.
The idea that assisted suicide will put pressure on vulnerable people to end their lives is already well-established.
Euthanasia proponents argue, not terribly convincingly, that doctors and psychiatrists would form a layer of protection for such people, preventing abuse, and giving patients time to think. The invention of the suicide pod, and technologies like it which bypass medical regulation entirely, kills this argument off forever.
Once the absolute legal and social taboo on killing is lifted, death on demand, for any reason, will be the inevitable outcome.