Going to Switzerland

Back in the days before France joined the ranks of countries in the world where ‘voluntary termination of pregnancy’ – in a word, abortion – is allowed under certain circumstances (thanks to France’s humane health minister Simone Veil, who also pushed through legislation facilitating access to contraception), Frenchwomen who wanted to terminate their pregnancies safely were forced to go abroad; and the nearest option, where many nursing and medical staff also spoke French (unlike in Britain, another common destination), was Switzerland. Not that abortion was actually legal there (it did not officially become so until 72% of the Swiss electorate voted it for in 2002); but the ban had ceased to be enforced for some time, and cooperative doctors could always be found (for a fee – so the Swiss option was only open to wealthier women). Until 1975, the year of Veil’s legislation, aller en Suisse (‘going to Switzerland’) was a well understood euphemism in the French upper classes. I’ve just seen a Catholic anti-abortion site in which such social discrimination is itself sternly criticised, with a hypocritically maudlin reference to the ‘thousands of women’ who could not afford the trip and instead died at the hands of faiseuses d’anges (‘angel-makers’, or backstreet abortionists) – but with no mention of the obvious solution: a liberal abortion law.

To repeat the obvious once and for all: women who want abortions are going to do it one way or another, and little is served by closing our eyes to this (especially if the eye-closers are men, who are never going to be physically saddled with the burden of an unwanted pregnancy). If it can’t be done safely and hygienically, it’ll be done in other ways. The site I saw might have done better to weep over the ‘thousands of women’ who died by their own hand – or were locked away in virtual slavery, as in Ireland for much of the 20th century – after being rejected by sanctimonious relatives and ‘friends’ for the ‘sin’ of getting pregnant, when all they had to do was ‘just say no’ (shades here of the no less hypocritical and unrealistic ‘war on drugs’). As the #Me too campaign is making only too clear – and as popular wisdom has always known – men won’t always take no for an answer, and are even socialised into ‘proving their manhood’ by not doing so. It’s still going on, with societal approval at the highest level – as the recent (but fortunately since reversed) acquittal of the Spanish ‘wolf pack’ has shown. The victim should supposedly have fought back (even at the risk of being killed), and her ‘failure’ to do so was ‘proof of her consent’ to gang rape. Judges who think in such terms still have the power of life and death over us.

But back to Switzerland. Today the phrase ‘going to Switzerland’ has taken on a new meaning. Over 40 years after abortion was legalised in France (only one EU country – the in other respects surprisingly liberal Malta, the first place in the world to outlaw ‘gay conversion therapy’ – still bans it, as do a handful of non-EU micro-states and the in other respects already conservative Northern Ireland, even though it is legal in the rest of the UK), the human rights struggle has shifted from women’s right to control what happens in their own bodies to everyone’s right to control when and how their own lives end – in a word, euthanasia.

I am lucky enough to live in the one of the still few countries in the world – Holland – where people can request a dignified death, rather than be forced to go through whatever pain and degradation old age and sickness may bring (see my earlier posts entitled Choosing how you die). However, mindful of the often tendentious arguments that are marshalled against this (almost invariably by religious people who blindly think of life as a ‘gift of god’, and deny those of us who don’t share that view the right to think – and above all act – otherwise), the Dutch legislator has made such requests subject to a number of ‘precautionary criteria’ which could, if and when the time comes, make it impossible for me to avail myself of this right. And, here again, my last resort would be to ‘go to Switzerland’.

Not, once again, that Switzerland has entirely legalised the ‘right to die’. But since 1942 – ironically the year in which Nazi leaders meeting in Berlin calmly agreed on the horrific measures that would lead to the Holocaust – Swiss law has permitted euthanasia in some circumstances. ‘Euthanasia’ is itself a loaded term – for the selfsame Nazis had already misused the German word Euthanasie to describe their policy of gassing or otherwise poisoning physically and mentally disabled people, whose lives were supposedly ‘not worth living’ (lebensunwertes Leben). But of course there’s a crucial difference between deciding for yourself that your life is ‘not worth living’, and having that decision made for you – as the Nazis did, with no right of appeal. In countries occupied by the Germans during the Second World War (such as Slovenia), not only Jews, Roma and homosexuals disappeared overnight, but so did patients in nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals, as well as disabled or able-bodied beggars – it was one of the very first things the new regime did, often within days of their arrival.

Euthanasia simply means ‘a good death’ or ‘dying well’ in Greek, and this is surely a right that should not be denied to those of us who truly seek that – as I do, if and when the time comes. None of the arguments so often used against this holds water in my case:

(1) I don’t believe in the existence of a god, so I don’t believe my life is a ‘gift of god’; and at the age of 67 it seems most unlikely I will ever feel otherwise. That is my right. If it upsets some other people, that’s not my fault. Let them turn the other cheek.

(2) I have no dependants. My parents died in the 1980s, and I have no siblings, spouses or children, or other relatives with whom I still have contact (some rejected me on learning I was gay, and as far as I’m concerned the feeling is mutual). My only partner and I broke up on bad terms, and for all I know he is already dead.

(3) The few friends I have left are of a similar age to me, and could well predecease me. Most live in other parts of the world, and I may never see them again even if they survive me. And many, if not most, of them share my views on euthanasia.

(4) I would not want to take my life by my own hand, for two reasons: I might very well fail, and be left paralysed or otherwise incurably suffering, at the mercy of what remains of this country’s social services after years of austerity; and the means I choose might prove traumatic, or even fatal, to whoever finds me (a decaying corpse, or a blood-spattered room) or is an unwilling instrument in my death (a train driver, or someone I land on after jumping off a bridge or tall building). And that is not my right.

In short, my reasons for wanting euthanasia if and when the time comes are not just practical, but also moral. And, as things now stand in the world, ‘going to Switzerland’ remains my best bet.

In the 1980s, having considered existing Swiss legislation and how it had been implemented over the past 40 years, a small number of organisations were set up to offer people like me the chance to die with dignity and peace of mind, and without unwanted interference by people whose views I do not share, but who unfairly claim the right to decide for me how I should die – exactly as the Nazis once decided who should live and who should die, and how. The principle here is choice. If a Slovenian psychiatric patient did not want to die in 1941, she had that right. And if I want to die in 2041, I too have that right. No-one else – be it a Nazi official or a Christian cleric – can or should make that choice against my will.

Some of the Swiss organisations only allow Swiss nationals or residents to join them – for to avail themselves of their services, which of course cost money, you have sign up for annual or lifetime membership. But some are also open to people from other countries; and so now I am considering becoming a member of either Dignitas or Life Circle, whose websites are easy to find (both have the .ch domain name, for Switzerland).

But to my surprise – not to say shock – I now find that Life Circle has a temporary moratorium on new membership. And the reason is a disturbing one. Its director will shortly be put on trial for supposedly having failed to obtain expert advice on whether a member who had requested euthanasia was mentally fit to do so. Since she is herself a physician and surely well aware of what Swiss law does and does not allow, I find it hard to believe she would have made such a professional error. But if she is found guilty, she runs the risk of several years’ imprisonment and a lifelong ban on practising medicine. She is over 60 years old, and a prison sentence could well mean she would die in jail.

Without knowing the details of the case I cannot judge whether the trial is justified; but I fear we may be dealing here with a religious-populist onslaught on yet another human right. Unfortunately, Swiss law is ambiguous here; and although the ambiguity is what allowed such organisations to operate in the first place, it may now become a means of preventing them from doing so by threatening their staff with prosecution and loss of livelihood.

A member of the populist Swiss People’s Party SVP (which in the French- and Italian-speaking parts of the country masquerades as the ‘Democratic Centre Union’) that has unfortunately been Switzerland’s largest party for several years has scathingly talked of ‘suicide tourism’ in connection with non-Swiss nationals or residents who come to Switzerland to die with dignity (since they cannot do so in their own countries). The use of this demeaning term implies that such people – who are obviously suffering greatly enough to want to end their lives in the first place – are doing this for the fun of it. A comparison with the similar terms ‘drugs tourism’, ‘disaster tourism’ and ‘sex tourism’ will suffice here.

When the Netherlands introduced legislation effectively legalising the possession and use of small amounts of soft drugs such as cannabis (as opposed to hard ones like heroin, cocaine and crystal meth, which are as strictly banned as ever), people from neighbouring countries whose drugs legislation was less accommodating began spending weekends in Amsterdam or Dutch towns and cities near the German or Belgian border to enjoy the fruits that were forbidden back home – and there was much talk of ‘drugs tourism’. Here you might fairly say that people were coming to Holland ‘for the fun of it’, since recreational drugs were hardly something anyone urgently needed (the potential medicinal benefits of cannabis were not at first known).

As for ‘disaster tourism’ – ‘rubbernecking’ by people who take a gruesome delight in travelling to the scene of traffic accidents or natural catastrophes such as floods or earthquakes just to see others suffering – I won’t waste any more words on it, except to say that they obstruct the work of genuine helpers and should be punished with the full severity of the law, just like the scum who nowadays attack medics and firefighters as they try to save lives.

But then ‘sex tourism’ – an even more serious problem, for it usually involves exploitation. First there’s sex tourism in which the ‘victims’ are adults. To be quite frank, I’ve done it myself; but I can’t in all honesty say I was exploiting anyone, or that anyone was a victim. When I first travelled to Greece in the mid-1970s, at the age of 24, I soon discovered an unexpectedly widespread subculture of men (some married, some not) who enjoyed casual encounters with their fellows (as well as guys from other countries who went there to take advantage of it). But no-one was doing it for money – I’ve never paid for sex in my life, and have no intention of ever doing so. So it wasn’t as if a rich northern European was going there to exploit poorer Greeks, let alone an older northern European exploiting younger men or teenagers – in most cases the men I met were older than me (as I say, many were married). The only thing you can fairly accuse me of is interfering in someone else’s family life; but it was only much later than I realised how wrong this was (and stopped doing it), and the men I met were also cheating on their wives. In those days Greece did not have an open ‘gay scene’; but the ‘down-low’ subculture must have been an open secret, as Greek conversations I heard around me made all too clear (such as ‘that way he’ll learn what we Greeks are like’). So here, yet again, ‘for the fun of it’ – and yes, it was fun, on both sides.

Sex tourism involving people in far poorer countries is another matter altogether. The 2005 French-language film Vers le sud (‘Heading south’) portrayed three wealthy middle-aged North American women who regularly travelled to 1970s Haiti – then a cruel and downtrodden dictatorship – to enjoy the sexual delights of young local men who were not in a position to protest. Here the protagonists were all adults; but economic dependency, and the women’s crass ignorance of (or decision to ignore) the local sociopolitical situation, were the crucial factors. This was exploitation, no question.

And then there is sex tourism involving children and adolescents, often with the connivance of not only the local authorities but even the victims’ parents, who are forced by poverty (or even greed?) to sell their own children into prostitution – and in many cases live on the proceeds. This is human exploitation at its worst; and the Western perpetrators can now quite rightly be put on trial for it in their home countries.

Smearing the work of organisations such as Dignitas and Life Circle as ‘suicide tourism’ is thus ugly populist rabble-rousing. No-one comes to Switzerland to have their lives ended ‘for the fun of it’; and they would surely much sooner die at home, in familiar surroundings and the company of loved ones, if only their own countries would allow them to. The problem is, very few countries do; and the few that do seldom extend that right to nationals or residents of other countries. And, like the director of Life Circle, humane medical professionals who take the risk of breaking the law to help others may face imprisonment, loss of livelihood and hate campaigns in the social and other media.

Another part of the populist smear is that physicians who provide euthanasia are cynically making money out of other people’s suffering. This is a base calumny, as those who utter it know full well. We are not talking here about exploitation, but solidarity and humanity. No-one is forcing people to come to Switzerland and pay to end their lives with dignity and peace of mind. Once again, the principle is choice.

Finally, the Swiss populists who bandy about such terms as ‘suicide tourism’ have never had any problem with non-Swiss nationals hiding their untaxed money in secret Swiss bank accounts to take advantage of Switzerland’s lax banking laws – no question of labelling that ‘tax tourism’, as long as it boosted the country’s economy. Too bad if it undermined those of neighbouring countries. International solidarity has never been a priority with these people – to put it in Trumpian terms, ‘Switzerland first’.

As I said before, this is not just a practical question – it’s a moral one. And let’s just hope morality prevails in the forthcoming trial, whatever the outcome.