Les Suisses gardent une attitude très libérale face à l’assistance au suicide, d’après une étude de l’Université de Zurich. L’autodétermination est importante.
Ariane gigon / La liberté
Les discussions parfois violentes menées depuis des années sur l’assistance au suicide en Suisse – particulièrement en raison des cas d’étrangers recourant aux services de Dignitas – n’ont pas changé, fondamentalement, l’opinion de la population sur cette manière de mourir. Une étude réalisée par l’Institut de criminologie de Zurich confirme l’attitude libérale de la population, qui est ressortie de tous les sondages menés jusqu’ici. Mais la nouvelle enquête jette aussi une lumière plus précise sur ce que pensent les Suisses.
Lors d’interviews réalisées auprès de 1500 personnes dans toute la Suisse, les chercheurs n’ont pas posé la question frontale du «pour ou contre» les organisations d’aide au suicide. «Cela aurait signifié «pour ou contre» Ludwig Minelli (fondateur de Dignitas)», a expliqué le professeur Christian Schwarzenegger, lors de la présentation de l’enquête hier à Zurich.
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Une majorité des Suisses est favorable à l’aide au suicide et veut pouvoir décider quand sa vie doit se terminer.
Une majorité des Suisses pense que la loi doit permettre aux malades atteints de cancers mortels en phase terminale de bénéficier d’une euthanasie active. C’est ce que montre une étude nationale publiée jeudi par l’Institut de criminologie de l’Université de Zurich.
Le sondage représentatif réalisé auprès de 1.500 personnes montre que la population ne veut pas accorder une aide au suicide à des malades psychiques ou à des personnes âgées fatiguées de la vie mais en bonne santé. En outre, seuls 36% des sondés affirment qu’ils pourraient recourir à une organisation d’aide au suicide.
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Preventing Social Death through Euthanasia Talk and End-of-Life Care – Lessons from the Netherlands
This book helped to clarify for me what it is that I most dread about the end of my own life – the possibility of “social death” in which the body continues to exist while everything that made me who I was, and which I counted precious, has been lost . This destruction of an individual’s spirit and essence, in effect a living death, is graphically illustrated by the experience of the author when she met an elderly Dutch man, who – pointing to his dying, bedridden wife, said “That’s not my wife” and then: “My wife; she’s here” – indicating the framed photograph of her which he held in his hand. Continuer la lecture →
Marcel Boisvert
L’auteur est médecin en soins palliatifs à l’hôpital Royal Victoria.*
Mourir n’est jamais facile et l’entourage (proches et soignants) – en dépit des apparences – ne contredit pas le mot de Pascal: «On meurt seul.» On meurt seul parce que seul le mourant entre, de tout son être, dans le mystère de la mort. Car «il est loin d’être évident que quelqu’un parmi nous sache vraiment comment aider les mourants à maintenir leur intégrité quand ils sentent leur désintégration, quand leurs relations se désagrègent et quand nous-mêmes les connaissons trop peu et trop superficiellement pour raviver leur appartenance et leur dignité (ma traduction d’un passage d’un éditorial du bioéthicien David Roy).
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In the latest issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Judith Nelson and colleagues provide a very nice overview of chronic critical illness. From the abstract: “Although advances in intensive care have enabled more patients to survive an acute critical illness, they also have created a large and growing population of chronically critically ill patients with prolonged dependence on mechanical ventilation and other intensive care therapies. Chronic critical illness is a devastating condition: mortality exceeds that for most malignancies, and functional dependence persists for most survivors. Costs of treating the chronically critically ill in the United States already exceed $20 billion and are increasing.” Continuer la lecture →
Read in isolation, the headline of the Guardian’s report into newly published research on doctors’ attitudes and behaviour (« Atheist doctors ‘more likely to hasten death’« ) might lead you to think that there are a bunch of humanist physicians poised, with potassium chloride-filled syringes, over the bedside of sick patients. However, the article itself informed us that the problem did not appear to lie with the average atheist doctor but rather with the average very religious doctor.
Professor Clive Seale, to whom society owes a debt of gratitude for his prolific research in this difficult to study area, published a study in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME), which involved asking a large number of doctors about their views and behaviour in terminal cases.
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Terminally-ill patients would be well advised to find out the religious beliefs of their doctor, according to research showing the effect of faith on a doctor’s willingness to make decisions that could hasten death.
Doctors who are atheist or agnostic are twice as likely to take decisions that might shorten the life of somebody who is terminally ill as doctors who are deeply religious – and doctors with strong religious convictions are less likely even to discuss such decisions with the patient, according to Professor Clive Seale, from the centre for health sciences at Barts and the London school of medicine and dentistry. Continuer la lecture →
This is what we are told by those who oppose our right-to-die activism.
Of course we care and of course we are not killers.
We want grown-up people to make their own choices. Old people are not children, who need grown-ups to patronize them.
We will all be old one day. Most of us are old, not yet that old that the question arises: do we want to go on living or are we ready to say good-bye to our loved ones and depart while still autonomous and fully conscious?
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The announcement of the Regional Review Committees Euthanasia that the
number of (mentioned) death by euthanasia in The Netherlands went up
with 13 percent made all the newspapers, even abroad. A comparison was
made to Nazi-Germany by a fairly respected British paper the Daily
Telegraph.
By Janneke Vonkeman
Walburg de Jong, press officer of the NVVE and Rob Jonquière, head
communications of World Federation of the Right to Die Societies wrote a
letter to the editor.
Walburg de Jong about the comparison to the Hitler period: ‘This is an
insult to the Dutch government and to everyone who wants to decide about
his life’s end. We don’t know why the numbers are higher in 2009. More
and more people like to make their own decisions, including life’s end.
They are well informed and want to die in dignity. Every five years the
Department of Health inquires into the matter of end-of-life decisions.
We hope your paper will find the NVVE to get the right information.’
Rob Jonquière wrote among others: ‘Do realise that it concerns the
number of reported cases which means that the Dutch physicians do report
those cases, contrary to the majority of other countries in which
euthanasia is not legalised. (.....)
"The comparison of the Dutch practice to Nazi practises is invalid;
under Dutch law the free choice is essential and when the Nazi’s were in
power there was no choice at all. (…) Last but not least, what makes
you say the Dutch law lends itself to misuse. Did you ever ask yourself
which misuses occur in The United Kingdom, and in which degree?
Dr. Michael Irwin reports on The Society for Old Age Rational Suicide (SOARS):
The Society for Old Age Rational Suicide (SOARS) was founded in Brighton and Hove (a city on the south coast of England) last December. Its main objective is to begin a campaign to get the law eventually changed in the UK so that very elderly, mentally competent individuals, who are suffering unbearably from various health problems (although none of them is « terminal ») are allowed to receive a physician’s assistance to die. For the first six months, its activities (mainly a local opinion poll in February, and the promotion of living wills in May and June) were limited to the Brighton and Hove area. In late June, the producer of a major BBC radio programme (« File on 4″) became interested in the subject of « old age rational suicide », and began interviewing various individuals, including Nan Maitland (of Friends At The End) and myself. Continuer la lecture →
