German Bundestag, July 6, 2023, Plenarprotokoll 20/115, pp. 14083-14084.
Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen.
The Federal Constitutional Court in 2020 declared the ban on commercial promotion [geschäftsmäßigen Förderung] of self-killing to be null. Pandora’s Box was thereby opened.
To declare suicide to be an act of personal autonomy leads us, in my firm conviction, to a terrible and deadly path. The Netherlands have gone before us in this way. The result is devastating: In 2021, 7,666 deaths by assisted suicide, and in that regard overwhelmingly by means of killing on demand [Tötung auf Verlangen]. That is 4.5 percent of all deaths there, 10 percent more than in the previous year, ten times more than traffic deaths. Calculated for Germany, that would be 34,000, three times more than presently.
When the assisted suicide law was decided on in the Netherlands, it was about extreme cases in which people were severely ill, without a perspective of survival. Now it is not only about incurable illness, it is ever more about physically healthy people who still have a long life ahead of them who actually need and seek assistance.
Kingston University made a study in the Netherlands. There, people with mental handicap and autism are legally killed. The study uncovered 39 such cases from 2012 to 2021 by means of a random sample of 900 from 60,000 cases. If that is calculated for Germany, then that would be 11,500 people in Germany, mentally handicapped and autistic, who would have been killed. A particularly tragic example from the study: A young man in his 20s who named the reason for his death wish: Social isolation. He wanted to die because he was lonely.
The circle of those affected thereby becomes almost limitless. In surveys of socio-economic panels, 42 percent of Germans declare that they feel lonely. The Dutch psychiatrist Dr. Bram Sizzo explains the motivation of people seeking assistance for suicide. I cite:
They believe this will be the end
of their problems and the end of the problems of their families.
That means, they take their own lives because they do not want to be a burden on their families. That is terrifying.
The draft laws put forward emphasize that the suicide should result from one’s own accord as an autonomous decision. They thus see entirely the danger that people take their own life under social pressure. I do not believe that they will prevent that; not one of the drafts. Against social pressure helps no double consultation obligation and no remark on a consultation document. Precisely in times of crisis, the pressure grows on the old and sick – not only on them, but on them especially – to be a burden on no one. We will have very many old and sick without families and very many more crises.
The Chancellor has spoken for more respect. The reality appears otherwise. A frequent headline in the spring was “Housing Emergency in Germany: Pensioners Live Too Grandly”. Regensburg University has proposed forcing the pensioners into smaller residences by increasing the rental prices, and in Berlin the Berlin Church Institute has shown the door to 110 seniors.
And added to that: The entire infrastructure of supervision, counseling and care of the old, the sick and those needing assistance, and of physically and mentally ill people, finds itself in an existential crisis. Care homes in great numbers are going insolvent. In Hesse, 25 percent closed this year. 60 percent of hospitals are in a business imbalance; many will close. The local provision for old and ill people is already bad and is becoming much worse. The emergency is growing. The average wait time for a therapy place for people in psychological distress amounts to five months. What will be the consequences if, in view of the crisis in care and health provision, it will be simpler to receive a nearby, open-ended [ergebnisoffene] suicide consultation than a care or therapy place? Before we strengthen the suicide prevention, you want to be concerned with open-ended suicide consultation.
These are not my values. We should live our lives in freedom and responsibility before God. The beginning and end of life lie alone in the Hand of God. In that, I believe.
Many thanks.
[trans: tem]
