Founder of Major Assisted Suicide Group Kills Himself

The founder of Dignitas, a controversial assisted suicide organization, ended his own life at age 92, the group announced Monday.

It’s a tragic irony that underscores the dehumanizing consequences of the deadly practice.

Ludwig Minelli, a former journalist and human rights lawyer, died November 29 through what Dignitas described as “voluntary assisted dying,” just days before his 93rd birthday on December 5.

The Zurich-based death group, which Minelli established in 1998 to enable people to end their lives “on their own terms,” provided no further details about the circumstances of his death.

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Dignitas, one of Switzerland’s most prominent suicide killers, supposedly has strict guidelines for accepting candidates and claims to have killed roughly 4,000 people from Switzerland and abroad since its inception.

The organization hailed Minelli as a “pioneer and warrior” in a statement, saying he “stood unwaveringly for his convictions when it came to the protection of fundamental rights and the freedom of citizens.”

Dignitas vowed to carry on its killing mission: “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.”

Minelli’s death comes amid a sharp escalation in assisted suicides across Switzerland, where the practice has been legal since 1941 under the Swiss Criminal Code.

Official data show a staggering 824.6% increase in assisted suicides among Swiss residents over the past two decades, rising from 187 cases in 2003 to a record 1,729 in 2023 — an 8.47% jump from 1,594 the previous year .The surge has disproportionately affected women, who accounted for 59.92% of the 2023 cases, or 1,036 deaths compared with 693 men, maintaining a consistent 3-to-2 ratio.

Over the full 2003-2023 period, women comprised 57.62% of all assisted suicide deaths in the country. Among those 65 and older — who made up 90.86% of 2023’s assisted suicides, up from 74.33% in 2003 — the trend is even more pronounced: From 2019 to 2023, 94.29% of suicides among people 95 and older were assisted, as were 87.71% among those 85 to 94.

Pro-life groups expressed profound alarm at the numbers, viewing Minelli’s passing as emblematic of a broader societal failure to value life.

“The increasing numbers of assisted suicides as well as the disproportionate impact it is having upon women is a cause of grave concern,” one analysis noted, attributing higher female rates in part to psychiatric disorders like depression and anxiety, which are “most common among patients suffering from a psychiatric disorder requesting euthanasia or assisted suicide.”

“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,” the report added. “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.”

Such trends, critics argue, amount to “a form of abandonment of the elderly, whose deaths amount to deaths of despair,” serving as a cautionary tale for similar legalization efforts elsewhere.

Minelli’s organization, once a beacon for euthanasia proponents, now stands as a stark reminder of the practice’s ultimate endpoint, they say — one that claims even its most ardent champion.