Culture of death being normalised in Germany

Normalisation or regulation of assisted suicide?

Eva M. Welskop-Deffaa

The debate on the legal regulation of assisted suicide has gained momentum. Shortly before the planned final deliberation in the German Bundestag on the three present initiative motions on the legal regulation of assisted suicide, four renowned academics asked in the F.A.Z. on 8 May 2023 whether regulation is needed at all. In fact, the Federal Constitutional Court did not formulate a deadline or an explicit obligation in its ruling of 26.2.2020. But it has given concrete indications at various points where and why it sees a statutory duty to regulate: At least where the personal decision to make use of assisted suicide can have a significant impact on third parties, there is a state mandate to protect. But not only there.

We need legal standards to clarify free responsibility.

Unlike in neighbouring countries, the Federal Constitutional Court explicitly does not link the legally permitted use of assisted suicide to the existence of a serious illness that is associated with unbearable pain or leads to death in a short time. The "free responsibility" alone marks the border between unpunished assisted suicide and punishable homicide. The question of how free responsibility is to be protected and how it is to be proven cannot be left to those who operate assisted suicide as a business model. On the contrary, legal standards are needed. There is also an urgent need for a legal clarification of the age at which a freely responsible decision about one's own death should be considered possible.

We need a legal regulation that ensures the institutional non-cooperation and non-toleration of facilities.

Institutions providing care for the elderly or for the disabled need certainty as to when and how they can prohibit suicide support groups from entering and leaving their premises. The circle of facilities that implement a protection concept that excludes assisted suicide must not be limited to denominational providers. It is not about a special Catholic right, but about the regulation of an inclusive institutional non-cooperation and non-toleration obligation, which makes clear that there are religious as well as non-religious reasons for creating spaces in which clients are reliably not confronted with the question of whether they want to make use of assisted suicide.

A legal basis for suicide prevention must complement the regulation of assisted suicide.

Suicide prevention needs regulated funding, which cannot be expected without a legal basis. Psychosocial counselling that prevents suicide and/or precedes assisted suicide must be reliably guaranteed in the existing counselling system without creating a "normalisation-promoting" special counselling infrastructure for suicide assistance seekers. Only with expanded suicide prevention can clear limits be set on assisted suicide and can we counteract the normalisation of assisted suicide. This is especially true for the more than 2 million elderly people who are in need of care and live at home without professional help. Those who regularly receive mailings from assisted suicide associations inevitably ask themselves whether this "offer" might not also be the right solution for them, especially if their own courage to face life has been lost at the moment, e.g. through the death of their partner.

Normalisation has long since begun.

If you type in "suicide assistance request Heveling" or something similar into Google, the first - sponsored - hit you are likely to get is a reference to the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Humanes Sterben e.V. (German Society for Human Dying), which says "Schluss.PUNKT" (Conclusion.POINT) in clearly legible lettering above a lime-leaf sky photo. And: "Under the free telephone number 0800/... staff will advise you in an open-ended manner on questions concerning the end of life. The focus is on your self-determination." Self-determination towards death, not towards life.

Those who want to protect the freedom to want to live on for old and sick people from a justification obligation must legislatively oppose the normalisation of assisted suicide, just as the theologian and medical ethicist Jean-Pierre Wils demands in his book "Sich den Tod geben. Suicide as the Last Emancipation?". Wils concludes his book with descriptions of the weariness of life that can grip people today because they have simply had enough of life. They are no longer curious about what the future might bring. After all the health programming we receive, they subjectively feel that their lifespan is simply "too long". They are missing the person who still keeps lines of sight on life open. "Anyone who wants to turn the inescapable subjectivity of this judgement ... into the subject of a political initiative is going down a slippery slope, a slope we would do better not to tread. The reasons for this strong reservation were the subject of this essay. We must not normalise assisted suicide."

Caritas President Eva Welskop-Deffaa

Eva M. Welskop-Deffaa has been President of the German Caritas Association since November 2021. Previously, after working at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, the Catholic German Women's Association and the Central Committee of German Catholics, she was Head of the Equal Opportunities Department at the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs and a member of the Executive Board of the United Services Union ver.di before joining the Executive Board of the German Caritas Association in 2017. Ms Welskop-Deffaa holds a degree in economics. She has held and continues to hold numerous honorary offices, including the KAS General Assembly.

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