April 18, 2024
end of life issues

Dignitas to expand suicide service from the ill to the well

Michael Cook

Remarkable BBC interview

In the first broadcast interview he has
given in five years, the Swiss founder of the controversial assisted
suicide service Dignitas has defended suicide as a "marvellous
possibility". In an interview with the BBC, Luigi Minelli said
that "Suicide is a very good possibility to escape a situation
which you can’t alter." And he dismissed the notion that his
service should only be available to the terminally ill: "It is
not a condition to have a terminal illness. Terminal illness is a
British obsession. We are not a clinic. As a human rights lawyer I am
opposed to the idea of paternalism. We do not make decisions for
other people."

Consequently Mr Minelli is going to
expand his client base from people who are terminally ill and/or
depressed to people who have nothing wrong with them at all. "There
is a couple living in Canada, the husband is ill, his partner is not
ill but she told us here in my living room that ‘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," he told the BBC.

More than 100 Britons have travelled to
the Dignitas “thanatorium” in Zurich to kill themselves in its
offices. ~ BBC,
Apr 2

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