Swiss assisted suicide group has 10,000 new members in 2017: report

GENEVA, Feb. 13 (Xinhua) -- Some 10,078 new members joined the Swiss euthanasia organization Exit in 2017, the group announced in a press release on Tuesday.

The number of actual assisted suicides went down slightly, whilst the average age of Exit members rose.

At the end of December 2017, Exit said it had 110,391 members in German-speaking Switzerland and in Ticino, the Italian-speaking part, according to the figures in the press release.

Last year, 734 people ended their lives using Exit's services, compared with 723 the previous year.

Swiss law tolerates assisted suicide when patients commit the act themselves and helpers have no vested interest in their death and assisted suicide has been allowed since the 1940s, Swissinfo, the website of the national broadcaster, reported in 2012.

The number of requests from people thinking about assisted suicide was about 3,500 and 1,000 more than in 2014.

Exit considered 1,031 of those requests, compared with 991 in 2016.

The number of people choosing "an end of their suffering with the help of Exit" was 734 in 2017, the organization wrote.

Although men are generally much more likely to commit suicide, most of the people using assisted suicide with the organization are women (60 percent), Exit said.

Possible reasons for this high demand for assisted suicide include the steady surge in memberships, but also an increasingly aging society.

Last year, the average age of a person using Exit's services increased to 78.1 years, from 76.7 years in 2016.

As in previous years, the most common conditions for which people sought Exit's help were terminal cancer, age-related multiple illnesses as well as chronic pain.

Most of Exit's patients came from the Zurich area, followed by the cantons of Bern, Aargau, St Gallen, Basel City and Basel Country.

Assisted suicides account for about 1.5 percent of all 66,000 deaths in Switzerland each year, according to Exit.

Death is usually induced through a lethal dose of barbiturates prescribed by a doctor. Ingestion of the poison, whether by drinking it or using intravenous drips or stomach tubes, must be carried out by the person wanting to die.

In 2006 the Swiss Federal Court ruled that all people of sound judgment, irrespective of whether they suffer from a mental illness, have the right to decide the manner of their death, Swissinfo reported in 2012. Enditem