“I see [technology] equally important in democratizing and demedicalizing the process,” says Nitschke, adding that the Sarco does not rely on severely limited medications to operate. “So all of these issues are ways to make the process fairer.”
In Switzerland, where the Sarco was used, Nitschke's arguments about access to assisted suicide are not particularly radical. Residents and visitors already have access to assisted suicide, even if they are not terminally ill. But in Nitschke's home country of the Netherlands, the Sarco reflects an ongoing debate about the place of assisted suicide in a medical system that dictates that only people faced with unbearable suffering or an incurable condition can continue. Nitschke also believes the promise of machines is to take the burden off the doctor. “I'm passionate about a person's right to access assisted dying, but I don't see why they should turn me into a murderer,” said Nitschke, who earned a medical degree in 1989.
Theo Boer, who has reviewed thousands of assisted suicide cases on behalf of the Dutch government for nine years, disagrees that gatekeepers are a bad thing. “We can't just leave this to the market,” he says, “because it is dangerous.” Yet he is more sympathetic to Nitschke's point that doctors should not be burdened with the emotional stress in countries where assisted suicide is legal. “Although what he is doing is strange, it contributes to the much-needed discussion in the Netherlands about whether or not we need this heavy involvement of doctors,” says Boer, who is now a professor of healthcare ethics at the Theological University of Groningen. .
“We can't burden the doctor with solving all our problems,” he says.
For thirty years, Nitschke has been an agitator in the debate over the right to die. “He is a provocateur,” says Michael Cholbi, professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and founder of the International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying. Cholbi is skeptical that the Sarco would ever be normalized, but he believes Nitschke's creation, while irresponsible to some, raises important questions. “He's trying to start what may be a difficult conversation about people's right to access suicide technologies,” he says.
Now 77, Nitschke first explored the idea of delegating assisted suicide to machines in the 1990s. After Australia's Northern Territory became the first jurisdiction in the world to legalize the process, Nitschke was concerned about the risk that people would view him or his colleagues as “an evil doctor administering lethal injections to a dying patient who did not know what was happening.” was going on'. say.
