Note: This articles was updated on September 10th to more accurately reflect the legality of the Sarco in Switzerland.
CV NEWS FEED // The CEO of a secular anti-euthanasia group recently explained why even pro-assisted suicide groups are opposed to the “Sarco,” a machine in which customers can commit suicide at the press of a button for $20.
In an Aug. 13 article for the journal Spiked, CEO of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (HAASE) Kevin Yuill described the Sarco, short for Sarcophagus, as “a 3D-printed death capsule.” A person enters the machine, presses a button, and is killed by nitrogen and a lack of oxygen in 10 minutes.
“The Sarco offers a glimpse into a dystopian future that we desperately need to reject,” Yuill wrote. “However unwittingly, the near-universal repulsion it has elicited has done society a great service.”
Dr. Philip Nitschke and engineer Alexander Bannink developed the Sarco, revealed to the public in 2019. Nitschke also founded Exit International, a pro-assisted suicide organization. Yuill stated that Nitschke “sees the Sarco as empowering,” then quoted Nitschke, who said, “You really don’t need a doctor to die.”
Use of the Sarco, however, has been put on hold even in Switzerland, which has some of the most euthanasia-friendly policies in the world, according to Yuill.
Swiss “life-ending clinic” Lifecircle said in 2021 that, “there is no human warmth with this method,” and Professor Stephen Duckworth, associated with U.K. euthanasia advocacy group Dignity in Dying, said he could not support the use of the Sarco.
According to Yuill, Duckworth described the Sarco as the “antithesis of what the choice of assisted dying represents.”
The reason that pro-euthanasia groups reject the Sarco, despite it being “the very innovation that meets their objectives,” Yuill argued, is that it “exposes the horrors of euthanasia that hide behind kind-sounding words like ‘assisted dying’ or the ‘right to die’.”
