(Oregon Right to Life) — Applications for use of a so-called “suicide pod” in Switzerland have been suspended after an American woman became the first person to take her own life using the device last month, prompting a police investigation.
In a Sunday statement, pro-assisted suicide advocacy groups responsible for the “suicide capsule,” dubbed “Sarco,” announced the suspensions. Prior to the decision, they said, 371 people had begun the process of applying, the Associated Press reported.
The suspension of applications comes after police in Switzerland launched an investigation into the suicide death of an unidentified 64-year-old American woman who used the pod last month to end her own life. Swiss law permits assisted suicide but forbids “external assistance” or the presence of a “self-serving motive” on the part of the individual or group providing the means of suicide, the AP reported.
“Sarco” (short for sarcophagus) was created by Netherlands-based suicide advocacy group “Exit International,” founded by Dr. Philip Nitschke. The device, made using a 3D printer, is effectively a gas chamber. According to the report, users are sealed into the pod and press a button that floods the compartment with nitrogen gas, causing them to suffocate and die.
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Swiss Health Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider had informed lawmakers in parliament that using the suicide pod to effectuate an individual’s death would violate Swiss law. Baume-Schneider made the remarks on the same day the American woman died in the “pod.” The groups responsible for the device maintain that they had been unaware of Baume-Schneider’s statement at the time of the woman’s death, per the AP.
The incident has sparked numerous arrests from Swiss law enforcement. Florian Willet, president of “The Last Resort,” a Switzerland-based affiliate of Exit International, is currently in custody and awaiting trial in the wake of the American woman’s death.
The expansion of legal assisted suicide and euthanasia globally has triggered serious concerns among pro-life advocates. Frequently billed as a “compassionate” option for people with terminal diagnoses, eligibility for legal assisted death has grown to encompass more and more demographics, including young people and individuals without any physical maladies.
Theo Boer, a healthcare ethics professor at Protestant Theological University in Groningen, told The Free Press he had served on a euthanasia review board in the Netherlands from 2005 until his resignation in 2014. During his time on the board, he said, he “saw the Dutch euthanasia practice evolve from death being a last resort to death being a default option.”
In America, most states continue to outlaw assisted suicide. Euthanasia – the deliberate killing of an individual by a physician – is illegal nationwide.
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Oregon became the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide – euphemistically called “death with dignity” – in 1994. The measure took effect in 1997 after overcoming legal hurdles. Last year, Democratic Governor Tina Kotek signed a law stripping away the residency requirement for the practice and allowing Oregon physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to people from other states. The Oregon Health Authority (OHA) had already stopped enforcing the residency requirement in 2022.
The rollback of the rule was followed by an immediate surge in overall prescriptions and deaths.
The OHA report for 2023, released in March 2024, showed an almost 30% increase in physician-assisted suicide prescriptions and a 20% increase in reported deaths following ingestion of the prescribed drugs. In a press release, the government agency attributed the uptick in part to the removal of the residency requirement. A total of 4,274 people have been prescribed the lethal drugs since the passage of Oregon’s DWDA, leading to the deaths of at least 2,847 people, the OHA report states.
