SSince the Constitutional Court declared the ban on organized suicide assistance null and void in 2020, euthanasia associations have accompanied more than 1,500 people to their deaths. However, we don’t know for sure – suicide assistance is a black box and the numbers are not officially recorded. The medical officer Sabine Gleich and the forensic doctor Matthias Graw have now examined the practice in a major German city for the first time.
How did you get the data?
Sabine Gleich: The health authorities view and archive all death certificates, that was our data basis. From these 45,000 documents from 2020 to 2022 in the Munich city area, we selected all cases in which the cause of death was stated to be assisted suicide or suicide with certain drugs that are common in euthanasia. We then requested the corresponding files from the Munich I public prosecutor’s office as an additional source of information. The procedure had previously been approved by the ethics committee of the medical faculty of the Ludwig Maximilians University.
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