Assisted suicide: Going gently | The Economist

The terminally ill should be helped to an easeful death, if they ask for it ON JULY 10th two people died whose lives, though long, were shortened by design and with others’ help. Sir Edward Downes, a British conductor, and his wife Joan had travelled to Switzerland, where the law on assisted suicide is the world’s most liberal. He was 85, partly deaf and almost completely blind; she was 74 and had terminal cancer. Holding hands and watched by their son and daughter, they drank a lethal dose of barbiturates and died. In most of the Western world, suicide is not a crime, but helping another to commit it is. But not all the incapacitated, or terminally ill, or permanently despairing are willing to wait for a natural death, or to take messy and uncertain measures to kill themselves without medical help. Increasingly, they travel to Switzerland, where assisting suicide is a crime only if it is done for gain (around 100 foreigners each year die at Dignitas, a suicide clinic in Zurich) and lobby their governments to change the law at home. In only a few places—Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the American states of Oregon and Washington—have such efforts succeeded. Most countries muddle along, turning a blind eye to those determined and rich enough to travel to Switzerland. Dignitas—which gives its proceeds to charity—charges SFr10,000 ($9,300). Read More: Assisted suicide: Going gently | The Economist