Zurich voters to decide whether care homes must allow assisted suicide

Zurich voters will decide on September 27 whether all hospitals and care homes in the canton must allow assisted suicide on their premises, SRF reports. Psychiatric hospitals and prisons would be exempt.

Hospitals and private institutions can currently ban assisted suicide in their facilities. The proposed legal change originated with a popular initiative that sought to require all hospitals and care homes to permit it. Parliament adopted the proposal in a counterproposal, prompting the initiative committee to withdraw its initiative. Opponents then called a referendum.

GLP cantonal parliamentarian Claudia Hollenstein supports the change because of her father’s experience. He had an incurable lung tumour and chose to die with the assistance of Exit. He spent his final weeks receiving palliative care in a Zurich hospital, where he wanted to die, but the hospital did not permit assisted suicide.

His family arranged for him to be transported home. He was not sedated because he had to remain mentally competent for the assisted suicide. “He was in great pain and had to endure it,” Hollenstein said, adding that she would have liked to spare him that experience.

In Zurich, most people who choose assisted suicide die at home or in facilities operated by assisted-suicide organisations. Only isolated cases take place in hospitals, while around 15 percent take place in care homes. All care homes operated by the public authorities already have to allow assisted suicide. They account for about 90 percent of care homes in the canton. Private institutions, particularly those with a Christian background, can currently prohibit it.

The Zentrum Rämismühle care home in the Töss Valley is among those institutions. Its director, Markus Schaaf, who represents the Evangelical People’s Party in the Zurich cantonal parliament, said allowing assisted suicide would be difficult. Staff and residents had told him it would burden them if someone died with the help of an assisted-suicide organisation in a neighbouring room.

Schaaf does not fundamentally oppose assisted suicide. But he warned against it becoming the normal way for older people to die. He said care homes should remain places where residents are not viewed as cost factors but are simply allowed to be themselves. He wants the small number of care homes that currently prohibit assisted suicide to retain that option.

In the cantons of Geneva and Valais, all hospitals and care homes are legally required to allow assisted suicide. In Vaud, Neuchatel, Jura and Graubunden, the requirement applies to institutions with a public mandate. Other cantons are considering similar rules, while the parliaments of Nidwalden and Solothurn have already adopted them.

The vote sets the right of individual institutions to reject assisted suicide on ideological grounds against the wish of others to decide for themselves how their lives should end. Anyone choosing assisted suicide in Switzerland must have the capacity to make decisions, a lasting wish to die and must carry out the suicide themselves.

Zurich voters will also decide on a separate proposal to give teachers more credited time for work outside lessons, such as preparing classes, meeting parents and organising school camps. The change would cost 83 million Swiss francs a year, most of it paid by municipalities. Most Zurich municipalities and the cantonal government oppose the proposal, while a narrow majority in the cantonal parliament supports it.