German Medical Association eases rules on assisted suicide

The German Medical Association has presented new guidelines for physician-assisted suicide, allowing greater leeway for doctors to rely on their own conscience when deciding whether to help ill patients die. The new text, presented on Thursday, reads: "The doctor's assistance with suicide is not a medical duty." Previous guidelines stated that assisted suicide was in strict violation of medical ethics.

Rather than justifying or endorsing assisted suicide, the association said it was simply allowing doctors to decide for themselves whether helping a patient die is justifiable. "When doctors themselves have a clear conscience, we will not condemn them," said Dr. Jörg-Dietrich Hoppe, the association's president.

Suicide itself is not illegal in Germany, nor is it illegal to take patients off life support or a feeding tube when they have explicitly stated that such treatment should be terminated. However, killing a person who explicitly asks to be killed can carry jail terms of up to five years.

The German Hospice Association, which considers itself an advocate for patients' rights, criticized the revised guidelines as simply removing the ethical component to the issue of assisted suicide. "The doctor is now in a dilemma," said Eugen Brysch, head of the German Hospice Association. "How should he, as a practicing physician, decide when the suffering is so unbearable that he should help his patient commit suicide?" Brysch said there is no way to objectively or scientifically measure the suffering of a patient, and that the German Medical Association needs to give doctors more qualitative guidance on how to make ethical decisions with terminally ill patients.

Much of the discourse on assisted suicide in Germany has been shaped by the euthanasia program of the Nazis, which killed more than 100,000 disabled and sick people who were deemed to be "unworthy of life." Deutsche Welle