The hot debate surrounding euthanasia will indeed keep emitting smoke for another few years until we’re actually able to produce designer babies or crack the code of life avoiding completely a situation where one is forced to end his or her life, at least due to physical pain. The reason we’re highlighting this old but still controversial issue here is not just because Switzerland’s suicide clinics have resorted to an unbridled killing spree, but also because the notion of being alive has taken a severe beating in the contemporary world.

Swiss suicide farms

The recent Telegraph report unearths the deadly way in which Swiss doctors are simply assisting foreign clients, who are suffering from depression rather than any painful and terminal disease, to die. Euthanasia is legal in Switzerland, however, the way it’s been carried out here fans the burning pyre.

The fact that Swiss suicide clinics attract hundreds of foreigners (300 in a single year) who are apparently euthanasized without proper psychological and physical investigation calls for stricter regulations and a complete overhaul of Switzerland’s right-to-die laws.

Prosecutors or monitoring authorities claim that in most of the cases they are not able to examine the real scenario under which a person is euthanasized due to lack of evidence. However, it doesn’t give reason enough to allow doctors to carry on this ‘passive suicide assistance’ or slaughter, to be precise.

Assisted suicide or murder?

Call it what your want! If we put aside the physical pain for a while, it’s obvious that every person approaching these clinics is suffering from deep depression. And patients sans proper decision-making capacity do not fall into mercy killing category. We can’t term it ‘mercy killing’ either, or we? Isn’t it deliberate murder? The legislation needs immediate government interference and stricter and lengthier monitoring is required as, especially, foreign clients are easily able to provide fake medical records and avail mercy killing.

It’s a serious issue, as people suffering even from minor or temporary depression may approach doctors in the wake of the fit in countries where mercy killing is legal and end their lives easily. Surprisingly, it seems so easy out there. Article 115 of the Swiss penal code ‘considers assisting suicide a crime if and only if the motive is selfish’, but the problem arises when cases where it is not are overlooked and a sheer crime ends as an open and shut case.

As Germans and British clients come in large numbers to Switzerland for the so-called ‘assisted suicide’, European Union too must interfere and revise the whole legal and medical framework of such practice. However, as per the Swiss Federal Supreme Court’s latest standard issued on November 3, 2006, mentally ill patients are granted rights to end their lives.

Now, it would again be fruitless here to raise the issue of ethics, however, sticking to the Swiss issue, one thing is sure, we cannot term what’s happening there as euthanasia - it’s a crime. Who knows how much cash these clinics are pocketing in to slay helpless victims brought in here by their ‘well wishers’ in the name of euthanasia?

Via: Telegraph