Legion of Angels News Archive

FRANKFURT — When Roger Kusch helped Bettina Schardt kill herself at home on Saturday, the grim, carefully choreographed ritual was like that in many cases of assisted suicide, with one exception.

Ms. Schardt, 79, a retired X-ray technician from the Bavarian city of Würzburg, was neither sick nor dying. She simply did not want to move into a nursing home, and rather than face that prospect, she asked Mr. Kusch, a prominent German campaigner for assisted suicide, for a way out.

Her last words, after swallowing a deadly cocktail of the antimalaria drug chloroquine and the sedative diazepam, were “auf Wiedersehen,” Mr. Kusch recounted at a news conference on Monday.

It was hardly the last word on her case, however. Ms. Schardt’s suicide — and Mr. Kusch’s energetic publicizing of it — have set off a national furor over the limits on the right to die, in a country that has struggled with this issue more than most because of the Nazi’s euthanizing of at least 100,000 mentally disabled and incurably ill people.

“What Mr. Kusch did was particularly awful,” Beate Merk, the justice minister of Bavaria, said in an interview. “This woman had nothing wrong other than her fear. He didn’t offer her any other options.”

Germany’s conservative chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared on a German news channel on Wednesday, “I am absolutely against any form of assisted suicide, in whatever guise it comes.”

On Friday, Bavaria and four other German states will push for new laws to ban commercial ventures that help people kill themselves. Suicide itself is not a crime, nor is aiding a suicide, provided it does not cross the line into euthanasia, or mercy killing.

But many here do not want Germany to follow the example of Switzerland, where liberal laws on euthanasia have led to a bustling trade in assisted suicide. In the last decade, nearly 500 Germans have crossed the border to end their lives with the help of a Swiss group that facilitates suicides.

“We want to make it illegal for people here to offer ‘suicide by reservation,’ ” Ms. Merk said. “That is inhumane.”

By helping Ms. Schardt end her life, and then broadcasting the result, Mr. Kusch has, in effect, hung out a shingle. A former senior government official from Hamburg, Mr. Kusch, 53, said he would help other people like her who decide of their own free will to commit suicide.

“My offer, since last Saturday, is to allow people to die in their own beds,” he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “That is the wish of most people, and now it is possible in Germany.”

With his penchant for brazen publicity, Mr. Kusch recalls Jack Kevorkian, the euthanasia crusader in Michigan who all but dared the authorities to stop his assisted suicides, and ended up in prison. But Mr. Kusch, who is trained as a lawyer, is careful not to cross the legal line.

In Ms. Schardt’s case, he counseled her about how to commit suicide, but did not provide or administer the drugs. He left the room after she drank the poisonous brew and returned three hours later to find her dead on her bed. He videotaped the entire process as proof that he was not an active participant.

Prosecutors have looked into the case, but it does not appear that Mr. Kusch is in legal jeopardy.

Mr. Kusch also videotaped five hours of interviews with Ms. Schardt, in which she discussed her fears and why she wanted to die. He showed excerpts at the news conference, causing an outcry. “A 10-minute video says more than if I had talked for two hours,” he said.

While Ms. Schardt was not suffering from a life-threatening disease, or in acute pain, her life was hardly pleasant, Mr. Kusch said. She had trouble moving around her apartment, where she lived alone. Having never married, she had no family. She also had few friends, and rarely ventured out.

In such circumstances, a nursing home seemed likely to be the next stop. And for Ms. Schardt, who Mr. Kusch said feared strangers and had a low tolerance for those less clever than she was, that was an unbearable prospect.

“When she contacted me by e-mail on April 8, she had already decided to commit suicide,” Mr. Kusch said, noting that she had also been in touch with Dignitas, the Swiss group that aids suicides.

In a goodbye letter to Mr. Kusch, posted on his Web site, Ms. Schardt thanked him, saying that if her death helped his battle it would fulfill her goal to have “the freedom to die in dignity.”

To some champions of assisted suicide, Germany’s laws do not allow for enough dignity. Ludwig A. Minelli, a former journalist who runs Dignitas, noted that those assisting in a suicide had to leave the person to die alone or risk being prosecuted. In Switzerland, he said, “the helping person, as well as family members or friends, could stay with the person who has decided to leave.”

The larger lesson of Ms. Schardt’s solitary death may have to do with the way Germany treats its old.

“The fear of nursing homes among elderly Germans is far greater than the fear of terrorism or the fear of losing your job,” said Eugen Brysch, the director of the German Hospice Foundation. “Germany must confront this fear, because fear, as we have seen, is a terrible adviser.”

Source — The New York Times

(CNN) – They beamed, hugged and praised one another. Their outfits even matched.

The long-awaited Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton unity event in Unity, New Hampshire, on Friday was carefully choreographed, with the images and speeches all designed to achieve one goal: returning Democrats to the White House.

Obama and Clinton appeared together in a town where they tied in the January primary.

“We may have started on separate paths … today our hearts are set on the same destination for America … to elect Barack Obama as the next president of the United States,” Clinton said.

“We are one party; we are one America,” she added.

The two Democrats walked onstage together to U2’s song “Beautiful Day” as an enthusiastic crowd chanted: “Yes, we can!”

Large signs reading “Unite For Change” and “UNITY” were held aloft throughout the outdoor rally as an enthusiastic crowd cheered Clinton and Obama.

Obama praised the New York senator for helping “bring this country a new and better day.”

“For 16 months, Sen. Clinton and I have shared the stage as rivals. … But today, I could not be happier and more honored and more moved that we’re sharing the stage,” Obama said.

“I’ve learned from her as a candidate. … She rocks! She rocks! That’s the point I’m trying to make,” he joked.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee also talked about the tension the two faced during the primary season.

“Now, I don’t pretend that one election can erase all the past biases and outdated attitudes that we’re still wrestling to overcome. And I know that there have been times over the last 16 months where those biases have emerged,” he said. “But I also know that while this campaign has shown us how far we have to go, it has also proven the progress we have made.”

Obama referred to the significance of the town’s name and its primary, in which he and Clinton each received the same number of votes.

“It is fitting that we meet in a place called Unity, because the truth is, that’s the only way we can solve the challenges facing this country. Today, we look back at the votes cast here in the snows of January not as 107 votes for Hillary Clinton and 107 votes for me but as 214 votes for change in America,” he said.

Earlier, Clinton took aim at Sen. John McCain’s candidacy.

“McCain is simply offering fours years more [of the Bush administration]. … John McCain and President Bush are like two sides of the same coin, and it doesn’t amount to a whole lot of change,” she said. “If you think we need a new course … vote for Barack Obama and get the change we need and deserve.”

Obama also criticized McCain’s stand on health care.

“You can go with John McCain’s plans to do nothing, or you can stand side-by-side with me and Hillary Clinton and finally, once and for all, provide the health care that every American needs,” he said.

The former rivals flew together from Washington. They shared a polite kiss on arrival at Reagan National Airport and sat side-by-side on the flight to New Hampshire.

Clinton campaign manager Terry McAuliffe said Friday that her team had been working to drum up support for Obama since Clinton suspended her campaign this month and endorsed Obama.

“We have done this now for three weeks,” he said on CNN’s “American Morning.” “We’ve done conference calls all over the country to all of our people. ‘OK, we tried. We gave it everything we had. Now we need to move forward and support Sen. Obama.’ ”

Asked about the possibility of an Obama-Clinton ticket, McAuliffe said, “I think if she were on the ticket, I think we honestly … would control the White House for 16 years. … But Sen. Obama’s got to make that decision himself.”

Obama has shied away from any talk of a possible joint ticket, although he’s said Clinton “would be on anyone’s short list.”

“I think we will have a terrific time together in New Hampshire. And I think that she will be very effective all the way through the election,” he said Thursday night.

This week, Obama asked top contributors to help Clinton retire her campaign debt of $22 million, about $12 million of which she loaned to her own campaign.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, each donated $2,300 Thursday to Clinton’s campaign, which is millions of dollars in debt That’s the maximum an individual can legally donate.

On Friday, Clinton and her husband, former President Clinton, each donated the maximum to Obama’s campaign.

Source — CNN