“I see [technology] It’s important to democratize the process and de-medicalize the process,” Nitschke said, adding that Sarco does not rely on highly restricted drugs to operate. “So all of these issues are ways to make the process more fair.”
In Switzerland, where Sarco was used, Nitschke’s arguments about access to assisted suicide are not particularly radical. Assisted suicide is already available to residents and visitors, even if they are not terminally ill. But in the Netherlands, where Nitschke is based, Sarco reflects an ongoing debate about the place of assisted suicide in the health care system. give instructions Only those facing unbearable suffering or incurable diseases can move on. Nitschke also believes the promise of the machine is to take some of the burden off doctors. Nitschke, who earned his medical degree in 1989, said: “I’m passionate about people’s rights to assisted dying, but I don’t understand why they have to make me a murderer.” speak
Theo Boer, who spent nine years evaluating thousands of assisted suicide cases on behalf of the Dutch government, disagrees that gatekeeping is to blame. “We can’t leave this to the market, it’s dangerous,” he says. But he is more sympathetic to Nitschke’s point that in countries where assisted suicide is legal, doctors should not be subject to mental stress. “Even though what he is doing is strange, it contributes to a much-needed debate in the Netherlands about whether such a huge involvement of doctors is necessary,” said Dr. said Bohr, a professor of medical ethics. .
“You can’t burden doctors with solving every problem,” he says.
Nitschke has been an instigator of the right-to-die debate for 30 years. “He’s a provocateur,” says Michael Chorbi, professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and founder of the International Philosophy of Death and Dying Society. Although Chorbi is skeptical that Sarco will become the norm, he believes Nitschke’s creation raises important questions, even if some feel it is irresponsible. “He’s trying to facilitate a potentially difficult discussion around people’s rights to access suicide technology,” he says.
Nitschke, now 77, first explored the idea of delegating assisted suicide to machines in the 1990s. After Australia’s Northern Territory became a world territory, beginning Despite being given the authority to legalize the process, Nitschke said he believes people are treating him and his colleagues as “injecting lethal injections into dying patients who don’t even know what’s going on.” He said he was preoccupied with the risk that he might be seen as an “evil doctor.”
