Posted on 01/09/2007 4:39:00 PM PST by wagglebee
Zurich, Switzerland (LifeNews.com) -- A Swiss euthanasia group that says it has coordinated the deaths of more than 600 people at its clinics there is coming under fire after a German woman apparently suffered tremendous pain when she died at one of its facilities.
The SonntagsZeitung newspaper in Zurich reported Sunday that a 43 year-old German woman with the initial A.H. screamed in pain for over four minutes before her death.
The Dignitas group gave her a lethal cocktail last November that eventually took her life.
Friends who accompanied her to her death told the newspaper the woman cried out, "I'm burning, I'm burning" and then fell into a coma. She was reportedly comatose for 38 minutes before finally succumbing to the drug.
Dignitas refuses to discuss the details of the case.
"We have no comment on any reports by the Tamedia house in Zurich," Dignitas head Ludwig Minelli told the AFP news agency about the company that publishes the newspaper.
If the allegations are true, this is the second time a German patient has suffered and been the victim of an assisted suicide that went wrong, despite assurances from euthanasia advocates that the process is painless and peaceful.
In August 2004, a Germany Dignitas client named Peter A. spent three days in a coma after taking the lethal drugs, the SonntagsZeitung reported.
A Zurich prosecutor told AFP it was too early to say whether it would conduct an investigation into the German woman's death.
Ludwig Minelli, the 74-year-old lawyer who runs Dignitas, told British lawmakers in September that the group has killed 619 of its members since it was created in May 1998.
In July, he indicated he plans to create a chain of centers across Europe and he claims in a recent interview that the group has saved more lives than it has taken.
He claims the group has saved lives by helping people to talk more about end of life issues, which has resulted in fewer people committing assisted suicide who might have otherwise.
"We are the biggest suicide preventing organization," Minelli claimed in an interview with Reuters, alleging that 70 percent of the people who Dignitas clears to kill themselves don't follow through.
"I have always been a person who helps people," he added, rejecting criticism from pro-life groups and others that his group encourages people to use assisted suicide.
Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, says Dignitas is doing a disservice to the disabled and elderly.
"Dignitas admits to having assisted the suicides of many people who were not terminally ill. As Minelli succinctly put it, 'We never say no,'" Smith explained.
"Minelli's position has a large constituency among euthanasia believers. Indeed, over the years, the movement has left many telltale signs that assisted suicide is not intended ultimately to be restricted to the imminently dying," he said.
Smith worries that, should Dignitas take its assisted suicide centers worldwide that a right to die will turn into a duty to die.
"Once assisted suicide is accepted in law and culture, the premises of radical autonomy and allowing killing to alleviate human suffering would conjoin, unleashing the irresistible power of logic that would push us inexorably toward the humanist nirvana of death on demand," Smith says.
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An OD of heroin would work as well and be painless.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
That's too bad. Either someone put together a bad mix of drugs or this woman's body still had some fight in it.
Probably still doing so.
"Painless and peaceful?" Not good enough. We have a method here that's "euphoric." We now use it liberally.
Everything I've read indicates that all of us, by nature, are instinctively resistant to suicide. Most people who successfully kill themselves use a high caliber gun, so even when they instinctively pull away it kills them, or they jump from a high building or hang themselves. People who try to die by an overdose of pills live more often than not.
This kind of thing will take you off the Great Mandela early ~ and send you to the Demon Realms for some refresher courses.
She ain't comin' back soon Fur Shur.
That's more traumatic than that execution where the guy didn't die for like 20 mins, at least he wasn't screaming out in pain...just shows liberals for the hypocrites they are.
Amazing that the issue is NOT that they are killing people but that they inflicted short term pain once.
We truly are the CHILDREN OF MEN.
And look how worried the left is about Saddam's "suffering" because he was "taunted." I guess that a genocidal thug dictator deserves more "compassion" than the infirmed.
It's a sad world we live in.
Wanna bet that the media ignore this or lie about it? They are more concerned about the pain felt by prisoners being executed, than they are by elderly or sick people who they eliminate.
See what I wrote in #14.
Well….that’s the way life is. Parts of the body don’t know when other parts are dead. The brain can over-ride its own will to live but that doesn’t mean all the cells in the rest of the body aren’t still independently chugging along under the assumption that all is well with the rest of the colony.
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