By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
In a perfect example of the reality of the “slippery slope,” the Swiss euthanasia group, Dignitas, is seeking permission from the courts to euthanize a perfectly healthy woman who wants to die at the same time as her terminally ill husband.
According to a report by LifeSiteNews.com, Ludwig Minelli, the founder of Dignitas, has been relying on the courts to erode the laws of Switzerland to allow suicide and euthanasia. He’s hoping this new case will stretch the law a bit further.
“There is a couple living in Canada, the husband is ill, his partner is not ill but she told us … ‘if my husband goes, I would go at the same time with him’ … We will now probably go to the courts in order to clear this question.”
Minelli told BBC Radio 4 that everyone has a right to kill themselves, whether they are healthy or sick, and that there should be no legal restrictions whatever on physician assisted suicide. He called assisted suicide a “marvelous, marvelous possibility for a human being.”
“It’s a right, a human right, without condition except capacity of discernment.”
Minelli, a lawyer, has argued in favor of assisted suicide for conditions that are not necessarily terminal, such as severe depression. “Suicide is a very good possibility to escape a situation which you can’t alter.”
Minelli also emphasized the cost-benefit aspect of suicide, saying that the health system saves the costs of protracted health care with every successful suicide.
“For 50 suicide attempts you have one suicide and the others are failing with heavy costs on the National Health Service,” he said. “If we would have another attitude to suicide, saying suicide is a very good possibility to escape. In many, many cases they are terribly hurt afterwards sometimes you have to put them in institutions for 50 years. Very costly.”
Albert Mohler, an author and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, commented that Minelli seems to be using the global economic crisis to “push the agenda of the Culture of Death.”
“The logic is clear,” he said. “We would be better off if certain people were dead.”
“The Culture of Death usually disguises itself better than this,” Mohler said. “Here the ugliness and brutality — the utter Godlessness of such proposals are here for all to see. Worldviews matter. Indeed, worldviews are a matter of life and death.”
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