 Assisted suicide outrages Germans
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-03 07:38 The release of a video showing a former local politician helping a 79-year-old woman commit suicide has caused outrage in Germany and prompted some states to try to tighten their rules on assisted suicide. Former Hamburg senator Roger Kusch, a prominent right to die campaigner, has said he advised the healthy pensioner on how to prepare a lethal cocktail of sedatives and malaria drugs which would kill her and left her flat shortly before she died. Kusch filmed nine hours of conversations with unmarried and childless Bettina Schardt, who said she dreaded being taken to a home for the elderly. However, she did not have a terminal illness and said: "I can't say that I am suffering." The subject of euthanasia is particularly sensitive in Germany due to the Nazis who some historians estimate killed more than 100,000 mentally handicapped or incurably ill people between 1940 and 1945. It is illegal to help someone commit suicide in Germany but Kusch sought to avoid prosecution as he did not personally administer the drugs. Details of the case, which prosecutors are looking into, were plastered across German media on Tuesday after Kusch showed extracts of the video at a news conference on Monday. "What Mr Kusch did was macabre propaganda which has nothing to do with politics," said Health Minister Ulla Schmidt. Agencies (China Daily 07/03/2008 page11) |
