Eugen Brysch, chair of the Stiftung Patientenschutz, urges the German government to outlaw commercial euthanasia. “More and more providers are trying to enter the market” he told the “Rheinische Post” (Friday issue). “Even funeral directors and doctors are teaming up to profit from organized, paid self‑harm”.
He reports a sharp rise in these services, noting that there are already at least 1,300 organized assisted suicides per year, and the real figure is likely higher because individual entrepreneurs are also active.
Brysch calls on the Bundestag to ban profit‑making assisted‑suicide schemes and to criminalize the conduct of individual euthanasia providers. They must be held liable for ensuring that the wish to die is truly autonomous and that no third‑party pressure or influence influences the decision. A legislative framework from the centre of Parliament is overdue.
The aim should be to bring clarity to the issue. Cases must be systematically recorded in mortality statistics; the recent growth rates over a few years are unprecedented across Europe. He links this trend to a societal discourse that frames care and ageing as burdens.
Brysch also criticises the current debate on health‑system financing. Even with reforms to health‑insurance funds, the focus has shifted entirely to cost, ignoring content. The cold, numerical cost‑cutting impacts older people who are not acutely terminal-precisely the demographic that benefits the self‑harm industry, whose business model already pumps more than six million euros into its coffers each year.