Assisted suicide in Germany. Savarino: “let’s pay attention to only apparently autonomous choices”

Rome (NEV), March 8,  2020 – Luca Savarino, coordinator of the Bioethics Commission of the Methodist, Baptist and Waldensian churches in Italy and member of the National Bioethics Committee, expressed himself, in an interview by the NEV Agency, about the sentence of the Federal Constitutional Court of Karlsruhe, Germany of last February 26. Such judgement declared unconstitutional the article which prohibits medically assisted suicide, contemplated in a law approved by the German parliament in November 2015. According to this article, organized suicide assistance is punishable by up to three years. Here following the words of Savarino: “From a personal point of view, I have always declared myself in favor of the moral lawfulness and of the   legalization of assisted suicide in exceptional cases, that is, very specific and circumscribed cases, such as for example some particular conditions of illness. Of course what these conditions should be is something that politics must decide. However, I believe that the request to be helped to die and the acceptance of this request, in certain cases, can be morally justified and should be legally possible.  I do not intend to go into details of the legitimacy of a German court of justice because I do not have a specific juridical competence; therefore my opinion is only ethical and political”.
And it is precisely from this point of view that Savarino agrees with the concerns expressed by the German Evangelical Church and the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
“I am perplexed by the idea that medically assisted suicide should be a possibility accessible to everybody on the basis of the right to decide the way and the moment of one’s death in accordance with one’s idea of ​​human dignity – said Savarino -. This type of position is in my opinion dangerous and unsustainable because there are situations in which individual autonomy would seem to be present, but in fact it is not so. I share the idea expressed in the joint press release of the German churches that this type of ethical legal approach, would entail the risk of excessive pressure on fragile categories of people – elderly or sick persons -, or weak categories of the population – those who are economically disadvantaged  – by inducing these people to implement seemingly autonomous but actually contingent choices, being them heavily conditioned by the social context in which they find themselves”.