ZURICH – Long famous for secretive banks and soaring peaks, Switzerland is now gaining a reputation as a death destination, a country where desperately ill people can come to kill themselves with help from organizations.

Isn’t that nice. When we think of the Swiss Alps we can now think of assisted suicide. The Swiss government should come up with a new slogan to attract even more people: Live Free and Die Cheap. (Tax not included.)

”What we do is no secret; we’re proud of our work,” said Ludwig Minelli, founder of Dignitas, a Zurich-based group that assists ailing Germans, Britons, and others who want to die.

”Our purpose is to fight for the freedom of people to end their lives when their lives become unendurable” because of painful illness or old age, he said.

Uh huh. And how do you determine these things? Do you have a test or a set of standards? If your customers come to you, do you encourage them to seek alternatives (yes, this might include the competition of simply staying alive.)

More than 2,000 people have received medically prescribed doses of barbiturates to kill themselves in Switzerland over the past 10 years, according to figures kept by the three main suicide organizations.

So-called assisted suicide is legal here as long as the agencies that arrange death do so for ”honorable reasons,” without seeking profit, although they may charge basic fees.

Dignitas has raised concerns among prosecutors in other European countries by facilitating the suicides of non-Swiss, a legal gray area, arranging everything from travel tickets to funeral services, as well as the fatal dose. Minelli said almost two-thirds of his clients come from Germany and Britain, where doctors are forbidden from helping patients end their lives.

The Swiss connection is just one part of a wider debate ringing across Europe, as doctors, ethicists, politicians, and ”right to die” advocates square off over whether assisted suicide and even euthanasia — presently legal in just two countries, the Netherlands and Belgium — should be entitlements for the dying or the grievously ill.

Dying is not a right. It’s a part of life, a part of the cycle. These agencies that arrange for death are making a profit of this. Over in backasswards Europe, it’s the epitome of the death culture.

The question of whether doctors should be allowed to aid in suicides is as bitterly disputed in Europe as in the United States, where a landmark Supreme Court ruling last month upheld Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act. Oregon is the first American jurisdiction to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

In Germany, the discussion carries the weight of the country’s horrific mid-20th-century history. Under Hitler, doctor-administered death was official policy of a state obsessed with ”genetic health.” More than 250,000 infants, children, and adults with severe physical or mental disabilities were killed during the Nazi era, ostensibly to purify the Aryan race, according to historians.

Largely because of that history, medical professionals in Germany almost uniformly oppose ”death by doctor,” despite public opinion polls indicating that a huge majority of citizens — 82 percent, according to one survey — favor legalization of assisted suicide.

In Europe I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of this is indeed related to “purifying” their race- to keep the costs of their fabulous socialist medicine down. It’s been a marketing tactic the likes we have never seen, promoting this “assisted suicide” stuff. Visons of endless pain and suffering have been drilled into the minds of people over there- no one wants that…and no one spoke up to say: “It doesn’t need to be that way. Doctors can elminate much of the pain and keep you alert…” – we don’t hear this. Makes me wonder if the docs are in on this, making some money themselves. Maybe they should have a public relations blitz about this. Palliative care works.

”We in Germany, with our history, should be most wary of promoting euthanasia or encouraging death,” said Dr. Joerg-Dietrich Hoppe, president of the German Medical Association.

”The killing of a person — and that, in the end, is what’s at issue — should not be the duty of a doctor,” he said. ”The duty of a doctor is to preserve life and to restore health. When cure is impossible, the duty of the doctor is to alleviate suffering with palliative treatment, not a fatal dose.”

Germany faces a quagmire here for sure. This doctor gives me hope. He speaks of an ethic that should be seen worldwide.

Advocates of assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia insist that it is the ailing individual, not doctors, who should make the choice of whether to live or die.

”Any pluralistic society must allow every citizen to live this last act of their life, that of choosing their own death,” said lawyer Jacqueline Herremans, head of Belgium’s Association for the Right to Die With Dignity. ”The feeling of the right to choose one’s destiny is certainly growing in the [European] population.”

Death isn’t destiny. It’s not something we get to pick and chose…it’s a natural part of life and we shouldn’t be messing with it. Let nature (or God) take care of this. There is a slippery slope here (no pun intended of those Swiss alps). Who says “End it here” with a consumer who wishes to die? Will these death agencies take on customers who have children that aren’t living a quality life? Or an ill parent?? When does assisted suicide turn into active euthanasia??

Opponents of euthanasia and assisted suicide assert that the experiment in Holland has already gone awry and that doctors occasionally prescribe death for comatose patients, including those who have never stipulated a desire for death under a living will or some similar legal device, as well as for newborns with dreadful, but treatable, afflictions.

”In terms of public opinion, euthanasia seems to represent the easiest answer to complicated questions of life and death,” said Henk Jochemsen, director of medical ethics for the Netherlands-based Lindeboom Institute, a Christian research group that opposes the practice. ”Europe has some aspects of a dying culture: It is aging. It feels heavy with history and has become rather pessimistic and gloomy. Support for assisted suicide and euthanasia is a discouraging sign of our times.”

Holland’s Groningen Protocols have gone awry…doctors from all over the world need to speak up! Children have been put to death, who could have lived lives pain free and the deformations corrected. It’s such a sham that these things are not spoken of. It is an easy and cheap way out- to die, to kill, to murder AKA euthanasia.

Opponents say that huge danger lies in the moral and social pressures they believe are created by legalized euthanasia and, to a lesser extent, assisted suicide. In Holland especially, critics maintain, euthanasia has become such an accepted medical procedure that people who don’t choose to die this way may be seen as selfishly using medical resources that could better help curable patients.

”Poor Grandfather, dying of cancer, may come to feel he should quicken the process, almost as his civic duty,” said Hoppe. ”Even loving families can be manipulated into thinking that quick death is always preferable to lingering death. But perhaps Grandpa wants a few more weeks or months, even in pain.”

Critics further say that once euthanasia becomes accepted practice for consenting adults, it inevitably raises thorny questions of whether to permit mercy killings of comatose patients or even newborns with terrible deformities. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine last year reported that Dutch doctors have euthanized small numbers of infants born with severe afflictions, in technical violation of both the country’s euthanasia law and the pledges made by politicians and activists who pushed for it.

68 childen were euthanized, who should not have been. Several had minor deformities such as cleft palate and spina bifida, both medically treatable conditions. Shame on these doctors. The push for a quick death does take away hope for those who chose to live. Can you imagine being a patient with cancer, and chosing life?? The pressure you would be under to do your civic duty. To die ASAP.

The euthanasia of newborns remains illegal in Holland, but the practice continues under a set of protocols that, in essence, remove the risk of prosecution for doctors who follow medical guidance and report the procedure. The newborn must be perceived to be suffering greatly with no hope of improvement, and the parents must give permission. Mercy killings are administered to between 15 and 20 infants a year in Holland, according to medical studies, mostly to newborns with spina bifida, a defect of massive brain and spinal cord deformities.

Oh puleeeze. Spina Bifida is not a disease of the brain! Millions of Americans are born with this every year and they grow up to be productive members of society. They are often NOT mentally retarded and often graduate from high school and go on to college….and gain meaningful employment! How backasswards is Europe anyway???

Euthanasia for other ”people of no free will,” including comatose patients and severely retarded or demented individuals suffering great pain from a terminal illness, remains a legal gray area in Holland. But medical studies quoted by European news media indicate that roughly 1,000 such individuals are euthanized in the Netherlands every year.

This is a holocaust people, on a small scale right now. It will grow.

Dignitas has helped 493 individuals kill themselves since 1998, more than half of them coming from Germany and Britain. Investigators in those countries have alleged that Dignitas has arranged the deaths of people who were neither dying nor even terribly ill.

”We do not want this travel agency of death,” Elisabeth Heister-Neumann, justice minister for the German state of Lower Saxony, where Dignitas recently opened an office, told the Die Welt newspaper. ”The fear of pain requires treatment for pain, not death.”

I have heard about this death agency “assisting” people, (ok, infants and young children with disabilities) with their untimely deaths. And of course we’re not going to hear about these things openly; you won’t read about it the papers because it’s all hushed up. No records are kept. That slope has been crossed in the world of death deeds for hire.