The right to die organisation, Dignity SA, believes a desire exists among many people suffering physically, to choose an assisted suicide.
Executive Committee Member, Sean Davison, says the organisation is optimistic that medical assisted deaths will be legalised in South Africa within the next two years.
He says 66 year-old Bloemfontein businessman, Johann Beukes, who died in Zurich, Switzerland on Monday with the assistance of the organisation Dignitas, made the right decision. Beukes’s joints disintegrated at an unpredictable tempo and since his childhood he underwent more than 30 operations and was in tremendous pain.
Davison says Dignity SA is hopeful for a law change in South Africa after a Pretoria High Court order was granted in April this year, allowing Robin Stransham-Ford, a terminally ill cancer sufferer, to commit suicide with the assistance of a doctor.
Davison says the ruling has set a president in South Africa which hopefully will allow others the same ruling.
"The Government is challenging that court ruling in the Supreme Court and should they fail, the court will ultimately instruct Parliament to change the law. The Organisation is seeking a law change to allow for an assisted death, so a person suffering unbearable pain, very often commit suicide on their own and it can go very wrong. We want to legalise it, so that they can have a guaranteed peaceful death" he said
