A 64-year-old American woman recently died in Switzerland, after using ‘Sarco’, a specially designed suicide capsule with nitrogen. The woman has specifically travelled to Switzerland to die, because assisted suicide is legal in the country, as long as the person takes his or her life with no “external assistance”, and those who help the person die do not do so for “any self-serving motive”, according to a government website. She died at a private forest retreat in the canton of Schaffhausen in northern Switzerland, and recorded her death wish on a video hours before she stepped into the Sarco. Then, she pushed a button, the machine filled the cubicle with nitrogen, and died.

A study published last week in the Annals of Internal Medicine pointed out a definite difference in health risks posed for surrogates compared to women who become pregnant traditionally and through IVF. The cohort study, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, was set in Ontario, Canada, and spanned nearly a decade — from 2012 to 2021. Researchers evaluated 863,017 singleton births from 20 weeks’ gestation and onward. Of these participants, 97.6% (846,124) resulted from unassisted conception, 1.8% (16,087) through IVF, and 0.1% (806) by gestational carriage or surrogacy. The goal was to measure the rate of severe maternal morbidity and severe neonatal morbidity — or the severe illness/disease rate among the participants.