Founder of Swiss Assisted-Suicide Outfit Dignitas Takes His Own Way Out—at 92

Well, this one practically writes itself.

Ludwig Minelli, the guy who spent decades insisting that "self-determination" means helping strangers kill themselves in a rented apartment outside Zurich, has now chosen the very service he built. Dignitas announced Monday that its 92-year-old founder died on November 29 by what it delicately calls "voluntary assisted dying," [aka: suicide] just six days shy of his 93rd birthday.

In its statement, the organization praised Minelli as a "pioneer and warrior" who "stood unwaveringly for his convictions when it came to the protection of fundamental rights and the freedom of citizens." Except that warriors don't kill themselves when they have the fight in front of them.

Dignitas promises to keep the lights on and the lethal barbiturates flowing: "The Dignitas team will continue to manage and develop the association in the spirit of its founder as a professional and combative international organization for self-determination and freedom of choice in life and at the end of life." [But especially when you decide it's the end of your life.]

Color me stunned that the guy who turned suicide into a Swiss cottage industry eventually decided to become his own best one-time customer.

Minelli founded Dignitas in 1998, and the group claims to have facilitated roughly 4,000 deaths since then. Meanwhile, assisted suicide numbers in Switzerland itself have exploded--an 824.6% increase among residents from 2003 (187 cases) to 2023 (1,729 cases), according to official data. That's not a trend; that's a rocket ride to the great beyond.

And who's riding it hardest are women and the very old. 

Women made up 59.92% of last year’s assisted suicides (1,036 out of 1,729), preserving a steady 3-to-2 edge over men for two decades. Among those 95 and older, 94.29% of all suicides from 2019–2023 were assisted. For the 85–94 crowd, the figure is 87.71%. When nine out of ten "suicides" in a demographic require an organization to hand you the cup, something has gone seriously wrong with how a society treats its elderly.

Pro-life observers aren’t mincing words. One typical reaction: "The apparently ever-increasing numbers of elderly people ending their lives through assisted suicide in Switzerland ought also to be deeply alarming for advocates and opponents of assisted suicide… It speaks to a profound cultural malaise that any culture would actively facilitate, and, to that extent, encourage its elderly population to end their lives by suicide."

Another called it straight: these are "deaths of despair" and "a form of abandonment of the elderly."

So the man who spent his life arguing that suicide is the ultimate expression of autonomy has now provided the ultimate object lesson. When even the high priest of the death clinic decides it's time to check out rather than endure another year of life, maybe, just maybe, that tells us something about the product he was selling.

File under: Be careful what you normalize. You might end up living, or not living, long enough to prove your critics right.

What a way to go.

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