Patients from around the world travel to Switzerland to end their lives at euthanasia clinics inside the country’s border. Erika Preisig, President at a Swiss assisted suicide clinic, and proponent of the practice calls the burden on doctors to choose which patients live and which die difficult, but justifies it with a quality of life judgement. Preisig says on recorded video “It is not easy to give death to a patient. It is easier to save them. But these are people who will never have good health anymore.”
This “burden” on doctors to subjectively judge whether a person’s suicide is “rational,” who’s life is worth living, worthy of care based on how they view the patient’s “quality of life” puts vulnerable people at risk. People with disabilities already suffer from subjective quality of life judgements, which is only exacerbated and eugenicized with assisted suicide on the table.
Read more: First approved assisted suicide in Italy is for a man with disabilities