Poll: Swiss favour assisted suicide, but not for foreigners

Sep 2, 2010, 16:50 GMT

Geneva - A majority of Swiss people favour allowing assisted suicide in the country, but oppose the use of the service by visiting foreigners, a poll released on Thursday showed.

Some 60 per cent of respondents in the poll conducted by the University of Zurich said they would approve of a physician administering a fatal dose to a terminally ill cancer patient.

About 70 per cent of people favoured allowing overdoses of sedatives that would reduce the lifespan of those with incurable cancer.

Less controversially, more than 80 per cent of respondents said they believed a doctor should be able to stop feeding a person in a coma or turn off a machine that facilitates breathing for someone who has muscular diseases and cannot survive without a ventilator.

However, some two-thirds of respondents said they oppose 'suicide tourism,' the news agency SDA reported.

Germans and British citizens tend to make up the majority of non- residents who travel to Switzerland to end their lives when suffering from a terminal illness becomes too great.

Only about one-third of people in the survey felt doctors should be allowed to aid people to kill themselves when they were simply tired of life, but had no illness.

The survey, which interviewed 1,500 people across Switzerland, also found that religious beliefs played a role in forming people's opinions about suicide.

Certain forms of assisted suicide are legal in Switzerland, though euthanasia is not - meaning that the person dying must carry out the final act, such as taking a lethal dose of a drug. Also, no profit is allowed to be made from assisted suicide by a clinic or doctor.

Several suicide clinics, such as Dignitas, operate in the country.