“The relatively brief statement rightly emphasizes that in order to improve suicide prevention, it is necessary to expand counselling services and provide further training for nursing and medical staff,” says Erwin Kress. With regard to a criminal law ban on assisted suicide, the Ethics Council reaffirmed its position expressed back in 2012 “that a legal ban exclusively on commercially organized, i.e. commercially operated assisted suicide creates more problems than it solves”. “However, the majority of the Ethics Council is not pursuing a liberal line, but wants to extend the scope of the ban, although this will not create fewer problems than it solves,” Erwin Kress continues. This is because “in the opinion of the majority of the Ethics Council, assisted suicide and explicit offers of assisted suicide should be prohibited if they are intended to be repeated, are made in public and could therefore create the appearance of social normality in their practice.” This serves “the protection of social norms and convictions that reflect the special respect for human life that is required”. “Norms and convictions here obviously refer to Christian dogmatic ideas that do not want to allow self-determination over one’s own life. Since many representatives of organized Christianity have a place in the German Ethics Council, this majority attitude is not surprising,” said Kress. The stance advocated in the ad hoc recommendation also aims to prevent “external influence in situations of precarious self-determination”. Erwin Kress: “The term ‘precarious self-determination’ is probably aimed at situations in which people could come under pressure due to care costs. Of course, it would be better to take such pressure off people through financial and social commitment instead of making it more difficult for them to decide freely whether to end their lives.” The position advocated by the German Ethics Council that “efforts to prevent suicide could be undermined if assisted suicide were to become a socially accepted practice” is, in the view of HVD Vice President Kress, “an airy-fairy inappropriate to the Ethics Council. The example of Switzerland shows that suicide prevention and socially accepted ‘assisted suicide’ can go hand in hand.” The will of the majority of the population of the Federal Republic of Germany is not reflected in these positions of the Ethics Council, Kress concluded. “Rather, it is endorsing a line that we already know from the churches, the policies of Minister Gröhe and the parliamentary majority of the CDU/CSU: ‘whose bread I eat, the song I sing’.”
On the topic
Humanist positions and arguments on the debate about assisted suicide have been presented by three distinguished authors of the Humanist Association of Germany in the brochure
At the end of the road
presented. They argue not only – under certain conditions – for the controlled provision of medical assistance in dying, but also for the introduction of qualified suicide counseling to prevent suicides. You can find the full text at the bottom of this page: www.humanismus.de/node/2960
