On February 26, 2020, the Federal Constitutional Court lifted the ban on commercial suicide assistance.

The 14th Doctors' Day of the State Medical Association of Hesse and the Catholic Academy Rabanus Maurus in Frankfurt's Haus am Dom was about "assisted suicide".

"Assisted suicide was never forbidden," clarified the medical ethicist Stephan Sahm.

Also, “businesslike suicide assistance” is not meant to be profit-oriented, but meant to be repeated.

Sahm spoke plainly: "Existence is preferable to non-existence." Therefore, assisted suicide should be rejected.

The medical ethicist was clearly "on the side of life", as the title of one of his books is called, but rejected an evaluation of suicide in general.

"But abstaining from the verdict does not mean approval."

Claudia Schulke

Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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All the speakers at the Doctors’ Day – including 200 digital participants – argued in the same direction.

No wonder that after five hours the objection of a palliative care doctor stirred in the audience.

Could anything else have been expected in a Catholic house?

Finally, in his greeting, the Limburg bishop Georg Bätzing complained about a "dangerous revaluation of the right to self-determined dying".

Unlike Sahm, he even spoke of suicide as a "defeat of humanity".

Moderator Dewi Maria Suharjanto from the Rabanus Maurus Academy pointed out that palliative care physicians with other positions had also had their say at this very location.

Question about the abuse of power by doctors

This time the chair of the working group “Ethics in medicine in the Rhine-Main area” spoke first.

In his introduction, Ulrich Finke named the core of this Doctors' Day: “solving ethical problems legally”.

Therefore, he first gave the floor to a lawyer.

Social lawyer Friederike Ladenburger, advisor to the European Bishops' Conference in Brussels, gave an overview of the complicated regulations on active euthanasia in neighboring countries.

After Belgium and the Netherlands pushed ahead in 2002, the ban on subsidies was also lifted in Austria on January 1 of this year.

Ladenburger pointed out that the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights "there is no right to die, only to live".

In the wake of Bätzing, Sahm criticized the purely individualistic interpretation of self-determination and praised the German medical profession, which had refused assisted suicide.

After all, there are medical options for limiting a patient's suffering: no endless chest compressions, fasting to death.

In Switzerland and Belgium, the excess mortality rate from assisted suicide is already increasing, and in the Netherlands it is even one of the main causes of death.

Sahm quoted the German Medical Association: "Anything that increases mortality is unethical." He also warned against abuse of the balance of power between doctor and patient.

For him, appropriate prevention is derived from the axiom for life.

The dilemma of autonomy and survival

The psychiatrist Reinhard Lindner from the Institute for Social Affairs in Kassel also advocated this.

Lindner came up with numbers and motifs.

In 2020 there were 9,206 suicides in Germany and 100,000 suicide attempts, 60,000 relatives were massively affected.

Mental disorders are the most important factor at 90 percent.

Less dementia, and yet men over the age of 70 in particular are at risk of suicide.

However, assisted suicide is “an educated middle-class topic”: the higher the age, the level of education and the socio-economic status, the more people, especially women, want assisted suicide.

He doesn't mean prevention at any price, but empathetic understanding.

The palliative and general practitioner Maria Haas-Weber from Hanau agreed with him.

Her personal compass: "Medical action is life-oriented." But at the same time, people's autonomy must be preserved.

It is essential to take the time and quiet to accompany the patient.

Haas-Weber pleaded for a value-oriented caring medicine.

“Finding life in dying” is palliative medicine.

This requires adequate pain and symptom control.

"We shouldn't promote an emergency exit, but we shouldn't block it either," said the doctor.

Palliative care and hospice wards are practiced suicide prevention.

But, according to Lindner: "The state must create systems in which autonomous dying is possible."