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German Lawyer Helps Elderly Woman to Commit Suicide

By Hilary White

WUERZBURG, July 21, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A former German politician has sparked outrage after releasing a video revealing that he had assisted in the suicide of an elderly woman, prompting some German lawmakers to call for a review of laws on assisted suicide.

Roger Kusch, a former secretary of justice in the Hamburg city council, admitted publicly this weekend that he helped a 79-year-old woman from the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg to commit suicide. Kusch is the founder of the organization Assisted Death. He said that Bettina Schardt, a retired X-ray technician, was neither terminally ill nor in pain.

In the video, Schardt said, "I can't really say I'm suffering, but I find it extremely hard to care for myself." Schardt, Kusch said, wanted to commit suicide to avoid having to move into a nursing home.

"She knew her physical condition was deteriorating, she figured life in a nursing home would soon become her only option, and she was not going to accept that," Kusch told ABC News.

Schardt had already decided to commit suicide, he said, when she contacted him in April. "She was a very analytical person. There was no question if she would kill herself but only how she would proceed in taking her life. She left a goodbye letter thanking me for helping her to die in dignity," he said. The woman died after swallowing a toxic mixture of the anti-malaria drug chloroquine and a sedative called diazepam.

Kusch told reporters that he counseled Schardt, but claimed that he did not administer the drugs himself. He said he left the woman's rooms and when he returned three hours later, she was dead. Despite his precautions, public prosecutors have now opened an investigation into the incident.

Directly assisting a suicide is illegal in Germany, and has been since the end of the Nazi regime. German public opinion is strongly against legalization of euthanasia after the experience of the Nazi eugenic euthanasia programs that led to massive campaigns of extermination during the Second World War.

Kusch has invented what he calls a suicide machine that enables people who want to commit suicide to self-administer a lethal dose of drugs. The medical machine is a modification of one that is normally used to inject medications over a period of time. It is able to administer an anaesthetic and a lethal dose of potassium chloride, and can be triggered by the patient. In Kusch's scheme, that he says would protect them from prosecution, doctors could assist a patient's suicide by preparing the lethal chemicals.

"It is the most bearable method for those with a death wish," Roger Kusch told CNN.

Lawmakers have responded to Kusch's confession with an announcement of plans to draft legislation clarifying the German law against assisted suicide. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a television interviewer, "I am absolutely against any form of assisted suicide, in whatever guise it comes." New legislation is not expected to be introduced until October, but the government called for a crackdown on incursions of any commercial assisted suicide firms.

"It is against the spirit of our ethics, the spirit of our ethical tradition, the spirit of the Christian image of a human person and against the spirit of our law," Wolfgang Huber, the head of Germany's Lutheran Church, told CNN.

Germany's Health Minister Ulla Schmidt said, "I reject this path categorically." Jörg-Dietrich Hoppe, president of the German Medical Association, called it "abhorrent and deeply shocking."

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