Ethical Counseling on Assisted Suicide in German and Swiss Right-To-Die Organizations: Challenges and Perspectives

During the last years, more and more countries have introduced a practice of assisted dying in their medical system and regulated it by separate laws or by additions to the existing body of criminal law. In this respect, the two neighboring countries, Germany and Switzerland, are exceptional cases. In both countries, there exists a long-standing and largely uncontested legal prohibition of euthanasia, but only minimal state regulation concerning assisted suicide. Right-to-die organizations face the challenge of filling the gap by defining their own rules. In this, the largest right-to-die organizations in both countries are advised by individual ethicists or ethics committees, with the mission to uphold ethical standards. The paper compares the role of ethical counseling in these organizations (in which the authors are the heads of the respective ethics committees) and describes the scope of their counseling work and the extent of their responsibility for maintaining an ethically defensible practice.