Zurich to Force Christian Hospitals to Practice Assisted Suicide

Under a referendum passed late last month, hospitals and nursing homes in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland, will be forced to offer assisted suicide even if it conflicts with their religious beliefs.

According to Swiss Radio and Television (SRF), on September 27, over 68 percent of voters in the canton approved the referendum. Only two of the canton’s 160 municipalities voted against the measure.

“Previously, hospitals and private institutions in the Canton of Zurich could prohibit assisted suicide on their premises,” reported SRF. Beginning next spring, however, they will have no choice but to allow it in their facilities regardless of their religious beliefs. Around 30 Christian facilities will be affected by the new law.

Political Suicide

Not surprisingly, left-wing political parties — and even the allegedly centrist one — thoroughly favored the referendum, wrote SRF:

Jean-Daniel Strub, a member of the Zurich cantonal parliament from the Social Democratic Party (SP), expressed his delight at the clear “yes” vote. He stated that the result strengthens self-determination for all people at the end of their lives. Similar sentiments were expressed by the Green Liberal Party (GLP), the Greens, and the Centre Party, all of whom had campaigned for the proposal.

The liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) lets its members vote their consciences; but its president, Filippo Leutenegger, “welcomed the clear ‘yes’ vote, saying it showed that the new regulation met a need within the population,” noted SRF.

Right-wing parties, on the other hand, were aghast. The Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which opposed the referendum, said it will now turn its attention to how the law is implemented, particularly to ensure that hospital and nursing-home employees are not forced to participate in assisted suicide. (Whether the law permits employees to decline to euthanize patients is unclear; the Zurich-based Catholic Media Center, for example, reports that it does not.) Markus Schaaf, a nursing-home director and member of the cantonal parliament from the Evangelical People’s Party (EVP), told SRF “he was disappointed but not surprised by the result.”

Dignity, Not Death

Swiss churches were also split on the matter. The Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich supported the referendum, while the Catholic church and some other Protestant churches opposed it.

In a statement following the vote, Joseph Maria Bonnemain, Bishop of Chur, cautioned:

Where the termination of a life is legally regulated and socially accepted as a possible response to severe suffering, our view of vulnerability, dependence, and dignity changes. A person’s dignity does not depend on whether they are healthy, capable, autonomous, or free from pain. It remains, it must remain inviolable — especially in illness, despair, and at the end of life.

Many people who express a wish to die don’t simply want to die. They don’t want to be alone, be a burden to anyone, suffer unbearable pain, or lose control over their lives….

I fear that this law — despite all the protective measures it includes and the understandable motives of its many supporters — could create expectations. Those who perceive themselves as weak, in need of care, or costly might one day believe they are doing others a service by dying. A truly compassionate, humane society conveys the opposite: You are not superfluous. You are not alone. Your life, even in its greatest fragility, is precious.

The chaplains of the canton’s Catholic hospitals issued a position paper in March warning that forcing previously “life-supporting” institutions to participate in life-ending procedures would damage both those institutions’ “self-image” and the “public perception” of them. Moreover:

Even if individual actions related to assisted suicides remain formally voluntary, the institutional environment as a whole is affected: spaces, processes, coordination, communication and the follow-up of extraordinary deaths are all interconnected.

The chaplains stated that they are already being asked for additional pastoral care for employees facing ethical conflicts on the job, a situation certain to worsen once the new law takes effect.

Secularizing the Sacred

Zurich is not the first Swiss canton to require all hospitals and nursing homes to offer assisted suicide. The cantons of Geneva and Valais have similar laws on the books. Others are considering following suit.

Nor is the push to de-Christianize Christian medical facilities confined to Switzerland. For instance, during debate over the U.K.’s proposed (but ultimately rejected) assisted-suicide bill, “Labour MP Lewis Atkinson spoke against proposed protections that would permit hospices and care homes to refuse assisted suicide on their premises,” penned LifeSiteNews.

In Canada, meanwhile, the Globe and Mail published an op-ed by columnist Andre Picard declaring it “well past time” to “secularize” all the country’s Catholic hospitals because they “refuse to perform medical assistance in dying, abortion, tubal ligation, hysterectomy, vasectomy, gender-affirming care, or provide birth control to patients.” Other institutions with “religious affiliations” that “refuse to allow [assisted suicide] on their premises” should similarly be forced to abandon their principles, he intimated. (Picard did make the reasonable point that when, as in Canada, the government is picking up the tab for care in Catholic hospitals, it gets to make the rules for those institutions — one reason among many to separate healthcare and state.)

But what of patients who prefer to be treated in hospitals and nursing homes where they don’t have to fear being prodded into letting themselves be killed? If they live in Zurich, Geneva, or Valais, tough luck.

As LifeSiteNews observed, “First, euthanasia campaigners sell death under the banner of ‘choice.’ Then, they take away your choices.”