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Group-Funding to Pay for Swiss Suicide?

Matterhorn.jpg

Have we become such a degraded and life-disaffirming culture that an Internet fundraising site is hosting a request to group-fund a one-way trip to a Swiss suicide clinic?

Apparently so. From the pitch at the site, to which I won’t link, since I don’t want to indirectly aid this effort:

I am 66 years old and now disabled, with debilitating pain which was caused by having a tumour removed from my spine, permanently damaging my nervous system. Medical experts have advised me that there is no longer any treatment available to alleviate my pain.

The money is needed to fund my decision to terminate my life at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, and in turn save the [National Health Service] huge costs in my long term care. I believe that the limited NHS funds could be better spent on people with the prospects for recovery.

This could well be a ruse. The fellow wants what amounts to about $40,000. Suicide clinics, as I understand it, charge about $10,000. But with demand high, maybe prices have inflated.

So far, two suckers takers. What ghouls. I hope this is performance art.

Photo: Matterhorn, by chil, on Camptocamp.org; Derivative work: Zacharie Grossen (Camptocamp.org) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.

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