BMJ  2003;327:52 (5 July), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7405.52-a

Letter

Assisted suicide and euthanasia in Switzerland

"Comfort care" needs robust moral framework

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—The belief of Hurst and Mauron that physician assisted suicide is not entirely contained within the framework of medicine is correct.¹ Physician assisted suicide entails a philosophical value judgment that an individual life is no longer worthy to be lived. The authors do not give us any basis for making these value judgments, but modern bioethics theory creates hierarchies of human worth which are then used to justify medical discrimination.²

The authors cite a notional 0.3% rate of assisted suicide in Holland, although the definition of euthanasia in Holland is limited to "the deliberate termination of another's life at his request." This rules out involuntary and non-voluntary euthanasia by definition, but there are several thousand cases yearly in Holland where patients' lives are shortened by deliberate active intervention. This includes infanticide. Twenty per cent of the previously unreported cases of euthanasia in Holland involved ending a life without . . . [Full text of this article]

Swanpool Medical Centre, Tipton DY4 0UB g.gardner@euphony.net

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