“all right [technology] It’s very important to democratize the process and demedicalize the process,” Nitschke said, adding that Sarco does not rely on a strictly limited set of drugs to operate. “So this whole issue is how to make the process more equitable.”
In Switzerland, where Sarco is used, Nitschke’s argument for assisted dying is not particularly radical. Residents and visitors already have access to assisted dying, even if they are not terminally ill. But in Nitschke’s adopted home country, the Netherlands, Sarco reflects an ongoing debate about the place of assisted dying in the health care system. instruct Only those who face unbearable pain or an incurable condition can move on. Nitschke also believes that machines can ease the burden on doctors. “I’m passionate about an individual’s right to assistance in dying, but I don’t know why they should make me a murderer,” says Nitschke, who earned his medical degree in 1989.
Theo Boer, who spent nine years evaluating thousands of assisted suicide cases on behalf of the Dutch government, disagrees that gatekeeping is a bad thing. “We can’t leave this to the market, because it’s risky,” he says. But he is more sympathetic to Nitschke’s argument that in countries where assisted dying is legal, doctors should not bear the burden of emotional stress. “Even though what he is doing is strange, he is contributing to a much-needed discussion in the Netherlands about whether excessive intervention by doctors is necessary,” says Bohr, now a professor of medical ethics at Groningen Theological University. .
“We can’t burden doctors with solving all our problems,” he says.
For 30 years, Nitschke has been stirring up the right-to-die debate. “He is a demagogue.” says Michael Cholbi, professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and founder of the International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying. Cholbi is skeptical that Sarco will ever return to normal, but believes Nitschke’s creation raises important questions, even if it is considered irresponsible by some. “He’s trying to foster a perhaps difficult conversation about people’s rights to access suicide technology,” he says.
Nitschke, now 77, first explored the idea of delegating assisted dying to machines in the 1990s. After Australia’s Northern Territory became a world territory first Nitschke had the jurisdiction to legalize the procedure, but he was preoccupied with the risk that people would see him or his colleagues as “evil doctors administering lethal injections to moribund patients who had no idea what was happening.”
