German church leaders have criticised a cross-party bill to allow assisted suicide, which is currently unregulated in the country.
“Claims shouldn’t be made that assisted suicide and euthanasia are a help for dying people - they rather represent a pseudo-humanity,” said Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer of Regensburg, a member of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. “They reflect an attitude of busy aloofness, which prefers to manage people’s oppressive life problems quickly and effectively, rather than via lengthy, possibly tedious care.”
The bishop was commenting on draft assisted suicide legislation, tabled jointly by members of Germany’s governing Christian Democratic Union and opposition Social Democratic Party, which currently awaits debate in the Bundestag. Addressing a hospital meeting in Regensburg, he said “patient autonomy” and self-determination should not be viewed as absolute values, or used to “burden individuals with sole responsibility for difficult decisions”. Meanwhile, the draft bill was also rejected by the lay Central Committee of German Catholics, or ZdK, which said all forms of euthanasia should be banned “to protect the weak in society”, in favour of an expansion of palliative care and hospice facilities.
The proposed law, to be debated on 13 November, is also opposed by Germany’s Patient Protection Foundation and Medical Assembly, which voted overwhelmingly in 2011 that assisted suicide was “not a medical task”. The former president of the EKD evangelical churches’ federation, Bishop Margot Kassmann, warned last week the measure would have “devastating consequences”.
Meanwhile a monument is planned in Berlin to 200,000 victims of a wartime Nazi euthanasia programme against the mentally and physically disabled.
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