Swiss Group Helps Those Seeking to Commit Suicide

Elke Baezner’s expression grows tender as she recalls the agonized lives she has helped end.

“It’s a very emotional and difficult time,” Baezner, president of Exit, Switzerland’s self-described “organization for humane death,” says of the six terminally ill patients she has helped commit suicide.

“You’ve been drawn into an intimate relationship; you’ve heard confessions and shared secrets,” she says. “It’s not like a factory conveyor belt.”

Switzerland is the only country that permits non-doctors to assist in suicides. Exit’s “companions in death,” headed by a retired pastor, last year helped 120 incurably ill people commit suicide with an overdose of barbiturate and sent manuals to hundreds more with advice on how to die.

Even the Netherlands, which allows assisted suicide and looks set to become the first nation to legalize “mercy killings,” stipulates such acts should be carried out only by physicians.

Most of the Swiss deaths are not publicized because Exit insists on its members’ right to “die with dignity” and shuns the headline-grabbing methods of the American right-to-die activist Dr. Jack Kevorkian.

A Michigan court earlier this year sentenced Kevorkian to 10-25 years in prison for second-degree murder for injecting a man suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease with deadly drugs. Kevorkian then released a video of the death.

In the United States, Oregon is the only state that allows physician-assisted suicide, under strictly defined circumstances.

“We are relieved that we can work within our laws and wish that other industrialized countries had similar possibilities so Kevorkian-type cases could be avoided,” says Baezner, the 53-year-old manager of a hotel boutique.

Swiss law provides for prosecution of people with a “selfish” motive who help others kill themselves, but it doesn’t provide penalties for anyone else who assists in suicides.

So Exit operates in a legal gray area. Under strictly defined circumstances, its “companions in death” are able to procure a fatal drug overdose from sympathetic doctors for a member who has been diagnosed as terminally ill and has repeatedly asked to die.

But the companions are permitted only to hand the lethal cocktail to the person seeking to die. They may not put the drug to the person’s lips, administer an injection or turn on an intravenous drip.

The group is not without controversy. Despite Exit’s insistence that it observes the law to the letter, a study by researchers at Basel University raised questions about whether all the group’s suicide cases have been incurably ill. It cited a case of an elderly man reported by Exit to have terminal lung cancer but recorded by the coroner as suffering from bronchitis.

Baezner says that all six suicides she assisted were with terminally ill patients. Each death, she said, was peaceful, dignified and quick.

After each death, Exit volunteers notify police and provide a detailed written account with dates, times and witnesses, she says. No Exit member has ever been prosecuted, she says.

However, authorities decided Exit overstepped the limits late last year and stopped it from supplying an overdose to a 30-year-old chronically depressed woman. The woman, who hasn’t been identified, said she had suffered from incurable depression for nearly 10 years and had failed in several suicide attempts.

After consultations with the woman’s parents, Exit’s chief “companion in death,” Werner Kriesi, a priest for 20 years, agreed to help her kill herself. But police intervened and took the woman to a psychiatric clinic. Under medication, she was released six weeks later.

“What I am suffering from is no kind of normal depression. It’s a gradual disappearance in personality,” she said in a subsequent interview with the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. “My heart is still beating, but that’s all. You can’t live like that.”

“I want to escape from the monster that I’ve become.”

A former Exit president quit over the case, and doctors argued that depression can be treated, but Baezner declines to discuss specifics of the case while Exit conducts an internal review.

She says each case needs individual consideration.

“There are some psychiatric cases which are so advanced that you can’t forbid these people to die,” she says. “If we know that the person will throw himself off the roof or in front of a train, then we have a responsibility to them and their families--but also to the neighbors and the train driver.”