A FORMER doctor at a controversial Swiss-based right to die clinic has called for an end to so-called 'suicide tourism' as she urged Scotland to legalise the method of death.
Dr Erika Preisig worked at the Dignitas centre where Scots cousins Stuart Henderson, 86, and Phyllis McConachie, 89, last year paid £15,000 to end their lives.
Dr Preisig, who is to give a talk in Glasgow on Saturday, said there would be no need foreigners to come to the clinic if Scotland and other countries brought their laws on the right to die in line with Switzerland's.
Dr Erika Preisig, who runs the Eternal Spirit Foundation, which helps people to die from her home village of Biel-Benken, near Basel, is to discuss the issue in a speech at the Mitchell Library.
She said: “How do we end it [suicide tourism]? Through legalising it in other countries.”
Dr Preisig and her foundation have already prompted controversy here because of their role last year in the assisted deaths of Mr Henderson, 86 and Ms McConachie, of Troon, Ayrshire.
Mr Henderson suffered severe hearing difficulties and Ms McConachie several strokes, but chose with the aid of right to die campaigners to travel to Dignitas to receive lethal injections.
Many were concerned that the pair, who travelled last year to Switzerland to die, were not terminally ill, and that they were choosing to die because of fear that they would be separated from each other and put in different homes.
Assisted suicide remains illegal in Scotland after Patrick Harvie's Assisted Suicide Scotland Bill, which he took on following the death of fellow MSP Margo MacDonald, was rejected last year.
Defending Mr McConachie and Ms Henderson's right to take their own lives, Dr Preisig said that separation had not been prime concern.
He said: “They did not want to go to a nursing home. They just couldn’t cope any more in the home that they had been in because he was almost completely blind and she was having problems with hearing and arthrosis, and all these old age illnesses which make life very difficult and reduce life quality so that after some time you just want death to come.”
Above all, she said, they were fearful of ending up in hospital.
But Preisig does not stipulate that those she helps be terminally ill. She willingly considers helping anyone over 85 years old who is “of sound mind” and not influenced by others. “I think everybody knows that above 85 life gets more difficult. You have no strength. You have arthrosis. You have so many illnesses. The possibility of having a stroke or something that takes away your mental capacity, increases. So if somebody is more than 85 years old, I do not want to interfere with their wish to die if it is well thought over.”
With our ever-ageing population, she believes, such help is likely to be increasingly desired. “More and more very elderly people decide that they have had enough of life and they have had a fulfilled life,” said Dr Preisig, “and they want to take off, as you finish your holidays.”
Dr Preisig is nervous about her relationship with legal authorities when visiting countries where assisted suicide is illegal.
She currently cannot go to Germany following a recent law change. “I risk three years of prison in Germany. So I don't go there.”
Dr Preisig has been invited to speak by campaigning organisation Friends At The End, whose convener Sheila Duffy said: “We know that legalising assisted dying is a very controversial topic and one which is often misunderstood. This was clearly highlighted last year when Stuart Henderson and Phyllis McConachie travelled to Switzerland to end their lives at a time and in a manner of their choosing.”
They were just two of over fifty people Eternal Spirit assisted to die last year; three quarters of these were so-called “suicide tourists”. Having to travel such a distance, said Dr Preisig, caused the cousins additional suffering. “It would have made have been so much easier for that couple if they had been able to do it at home. They were so ill that actually they were hardly even able to travel with assistance. It was very hard on them to come to Switzerland."
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