February 12, 2019
The Right to Choose Death
Sunday Business Post (IE), Siobhán Brett
Philip Nitschke is now 71 years of age, but he was almost 50 when he
came up with a device he called a “deliverance machine”.
The Australian doctor set up a bedside computer that was designed – once three unambiguous questions were answered affirmatively – to administer a lethal dose of barbiturates, intravenously, with one click.
Since then, Nitschke and his contemporaries in the right-to-die movement have moved on from rudimentary beginnings (including, at the start, makeshift techniques using helium balloon kits and plastic bags) to newer, more elaborate means of ending one’s own life …