Assisted suicide: Ultimate freedom for human beings?

The suicide of a physically healthy person is a gut-wrenching event speaking of despair, abandonment or rage at life.

But when a terminally ill person chooses to kill themselves, there is a far different set of moral questions and balances to be considered.

What about the person battling agonies as their body shuts down around them and while their family watch in helpless anguish?

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Should they not be allowed to put themselves out of their misery? Should they not have that right?

In many countries, euthanasia and assisted suicide are prohibited but in Switzerland, the law generally allows this way out, provided the person commits the lethal act themselves.

Now, an assisted dying group in Zurich expects a portable “suicide pod” to be used within months.

The space-age-looking Sarco capsule, first unveiled in 2019, replaces the oxygen inside it with nitrogen, causing death by hypoxia. It will cost $20 (about R360) to use.

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Proponents describe it as a “beautiful way to die”, of breathing air without oxygen until “falling asleep” into death.

Perhaps Sarco offers human beings the ultimate freedom – the freedom to decide when their lives on earth will be over.

And we would have to say: How can that be wrong?