By Dave Andrusko

It takes a lot to surprise me, after all these years watching our many benighted opponents. And while I knew a little bit about Dignitas, a radical-by-anyone's-standard assisted suicide group, it wasn't until I read a piece over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal that I appreciated just how far its founder is happily willing to go. (See
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703414504575001363599545120.html#articleTabs%3Dcomments.)

Ludwig Minelli, Dignitas founder

The headline qualifies as one of those great understatements: "Assisted-Suicide Pioneer Stirs a Legal Backlash." The "pioneer" is Ludwig A. Minelli, whose organization is estimated to have "helped" more than a thousand people to die since 1998.

Judging by the story, written by Deborah Ball and Julia Mengewein, it takes a lot to get the Swiss nervous. However, "Lately, the increasingly controversial activities of Dignitas and its founder, Ludwig Minelli, are pushing even the famously tolerant Swiss too far, prompting calls for changes in the nation's assisted-suicide law."

I want you to read the article so let me just enumerate some of the reasons Minelli's organization is under scrutiny, not that he appears to be the least bit nervous.

* Dignitas' fee of 10,000 Swiss francs ($10,500). Minelli attributes the very high cost helping to pay to "his legal and lobbying expenses." According to Ball and Mengewein, "One rival right-to-die organization asks for nothing beyond a 45-Swiss-franc membership fee, while another charges 4,000 Swiss francs."

* Switzerland is assuming a reputation for "suicide tourism." Whereas other Swiss groups don't assist foreigners,

* Dignitas only helps foreigners." And the numbers grow each year, from 91 in 2003 to 132 in 2007. "As of the end of last year, Dignitas had helped a total of 1,046 people to commit suicide," we learn.

* The locales where people are "helped" to die. One married couple died "not in a private medical facility, but in an industrial space next to a large brothel," according to Daniel Ball, the brother of the wife, "just two spare rooms without a bathroom." According to Ball, "There was just one single bed, forcing Mr. Peninou [the husband] to sit in a chair near his wife when the couple took the lethal dose."

* It seemed like a factory," recalls Mr. Gall, 71. "It was an awful, ugly place."

* And most significantly, as the "agent provocateur of Switzerland's right-to-die movement," Minelli "argues that anyone--the chronically ill, the mentally ill or those who are simply tired of living--deserves help to end it all," Ball and Mengewein write.

Minelli has been all over the news in Europe the last two years, "helping to organize suicides of people who weren't terminally ill, including a prominent British conductor who had gone blind and deaf and a 23-year-old rugby player who was left paralyzed during a game."

There is essentially no law on assisted suicide. According to the story, under Swiss law, the only limitation is that "it is illegal for a person to assist a suicide for their own 'selfish' reasons."

So, the drift of the article is that the Swiss are very soft on assisted suicide and Minelli just keeps pushing the envelope. Some people, at least, are taking a second look at Switzerland's laissez faire attitude.

Proponents of making it "tougher" for groups like Dignitas to "help" people to die say that "if there is a backlash against assisted suicide here, we will have Minelli to thank for it." Alberto Bondolfi, a medical ethicist and member of a government panel that drew up the proposals, added, "He is the most aggressive in demanding a right to assisted suicide."

There are plans to have a vote in March "on a bill that would sharply restrict the activities of right-to-die organizations," according to the story. "For instance, two doctors must testify that a person is terminally ill, thus ruling out assistance for the chronically or mentally ill. The person seeking help must have given long consideration to his wish to die before doctors can prescribe lethal drugs. Moreover, right-to-die groups would be barred from accepting payments beyond those covering the costs of the suicide."

Significantly, a second bill to ban assisted suicide was tabled by the government.

Minelli is confident the new proposal "will never pass" and, if it did, "Swiss voters would subsequently reject it in a referendum," according to Ball and Mengewein.

A good slippery slope lesson for us here at home. As someone once wrote, "Death, once invited in, leaves its bloody footprints everywhere."

Part One