By Father Shenan J. Boquet
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the disturbing and growing trend of couples committing assisted suicide together. Apparently, I’m not the only one who noticed this growing trend.
A few days ago, Dr. Philip Nitschke, the founder and director of Exit International, also known as Australia’s “Dr. Death,” unveiled the design for his newest iteration of his infamous “Sarco Pod.”
The Sarco Pod is a futuristic-looking device, designed with one end in mind: death. A person who wishes to commit suicide climbs into the sleek pod, which looks like something straight out of the Tron movies. He then presses a button, and the device fills up with a lethal quantity of nitrogen gas, killing him.
Nitschke’s newest killing machine, called the “Double Dutch” Sarco, is designed for couples. The device is an enlarged version of the single suicide device. Like the first, it is 3D printed. Nitschke says the new device is currently being printed and assembled in Rotterdam and will be ready for use within the next several months.
Speaking of his new device, Nitschke told The Daily Mail: “I’m not suggesting everyone’s going to race forward and say: ‘Boy, I really want to climb into one of those things.’ But some people do.”
He’s quite right. As I told you in December, and as was reported in The European Conservative, there are dozens of cases of couples committing suicide together every year in the Netherlands alone. And the numbers are growing with every passing year.
Nitschke explained the motivation for designing the new device by noting that one of the comments he received in relation to his original Sarco Pod was, “It’s so lonely, I want to be held by someone when I die… when you’re in a capsule, you’re isolated.”
His solution? Allow couples to kill themselves together.
A New Low: AI-enabled Suicide
The fact that Nitschke is proactively helping couples commit suicide isn’t necessarily the most disturbing thing about his new device.
According to Dutch law, a person who wishes to commit assisted suicide must be certified as mentally fit to make such a consequential decision by a psychiatrist.
That this certification process involves a certain amount of friction is by design. It amounts to the bare minimum regulatory effort to ensure that those seeking suicide are not doing so under pressure, or while in altered mental states.
However, for suicide enthusiasts like Nitschke such minimal requirements like this pose an inconvenient and unnecessary obstacle to suicide. And so, Nitschke has now come up with a clever way to circumvent the requirement: artificial intelligence.
The new couples suicide machine will be equipped with an artificial intelligence module that will replace the required psychiatric assessment.
As Nitschke explained, “With the new Double Dutch, we’ll have the software incorporated, so you’ll have to do your little test online with an [artificial intelligence] avatar, and if you pass that test, then the avatar tells you you’ve got mental capacity.”
If the AI avatar determines that the couple have “passed” the test, it will power the machine on. If both members of the couple climb into the machine and press two buttons at the same time within the next 24 hours, the gas will be released, and they will die.
Philip Nitschke and the Revival of “Dr. Death”
There are, it seems to me, few things more reckless and dystopian than putting a decision about the “mental fitness” for suicide (not that suicide is ever morally permissible) into an impersonal, artificial intelligence algorithm.
In writing about the topics of assisted suicide, euthanasia and abortion, I have often mentioned how many of the main proponents of these practices are deeply disturbed, seeming to have a lurid fascination, and even love affair, with death.
The most famous American proponent of euthanasia was Jack Kevorkian, AKA Dr. Death, who moonlighted as a painter. His paintings are notoriously disturbing, revealing a dark and diseased consciousness.
Like Kevorkian, Dr. Nitschke has been called “Dr. Death.” And indeed, he seems cut from the same cloth as Kevorkian.
Nitschke has spent most of his “medical” career devising ever more clever ways for people to kill themselves and then marketing those devices to vulnerable people.
Among the devices he has devised is The Exit Bag (or “Exit Hood”), a plastic hood used with an inert gas like nitrogen or helium, designed to cause death through hypoxia. Then there was the Deliverance Machine, a device that allowed a person to self-administer a lethal injection by computer control after answering a series of questions confirming their intent.
And now, of course, there is the “Sarco Pod.”
Nitschke has also published and made publicly available guides and information about various suicide methods, including through his books and Exit International materials.
In other words, he is a salesman for suicide.
Couples Suicide: The Inversion of the Marriage Covenant
The Catholic Church teaches that life is a gift from God, and we are its stewards, not its owners. We do not have absolute dominion over our lives to dispose of them at will.
But while every instance of assisted suicide or euthanasia is a violation of this principle, there is something especially disturbing about couples suicides.
These dual suicides are often presented in the media as romantic final acts, couples choosing to die together rather than face separation or decline. Yet this sentimentality obscures a darker reality: the devaluation of elderly and suffering persons and a profound violation of the sacredness of the marriage covenant.
The message sent by the media’s valorization of this new trend is that life with disability, illness, or dependency is not worth living — that we are burdens to be eliminated rather than beloved persons deserving care and accompaniment in our final days.
Furthermore, we cannot ignore that assisted suicide for couples introduces coercive dynamics into the most intimate relationship. When one spouse chooses death, enormous pressure falls upon the other to participate, even if they harbor doubts or would prefer to continue living.
This corruption of marital love — meant to be life-giving and mutually supportive — into a pact of mutual destruction represents a tragic inversion of the marriage covenant.
Such things, however, are of no concern to suicide enthusiasts like Nitschke.
The Redemptive Power of Suffering
One of the great tragedies of assisted suicide and euthanasia is how they often rob the suffering person, and those who love them, of an opportunity to grow in love and communion.
This is not to romanticize suffering or deny its very real hardships, but to recognize that the crucible of serious illness can (and often does) refine and deepen love in ways that comfort and health cannot.
When one spouse becomes severely ill, the healthy partner is called to live out their marriage vows in the most concrete way possible. “In sickness and in health” ceases to be an abstract promise and becomes daily reality — bathing, feeding, comforting, advocating. This is sacrificial love made tangible.
As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Salvifici doloris, suffering can become “a source of joy” (no. 27) when it is accepted as “a special call to the virtue which man must exercise on his own part” (no. 23). Through these humble acts of service, the caregiver participates in Christ’s own self-emptying love, discovering that true fulfillment comes not from ease but from giving oneself completely for the beloved.
Saint Paul reminds us that we are called to “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2). The vulnerability involved in facing suffering and death together, as a couple, creates an intimacy that transcends the physical dimension of marriage.
When couples face illness together with faith, they participate in the mystery of the cross, offering their struggles for their own sanctification, for each other, and for the world. Many people will testify that caring for a dying spouse, while exhausting in ways that pushed them to the limit of endurance, also became the most meaningful period of their marriage.
There is a social side to this heroic embrace of suffering. The witness of couples who embrace love in suffering radiates outward, teaching children and grandchildren that persons have value beyond their productivity, that love means presence in suffering, and that life remains precious until its natural end.
Human Dignity: The Foundation of Catholic Social Teaching
The dignity of the human person is the cornerstone of all Catholic social teaching, and Sacred Scripture teaches that each and every person is made in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26). This understanding is the source of our belief in the inherent and inviolable dignity of the human person.
The United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB) champions this perspective in its document The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services. Here, the bishops affirm a moral vision for Catholic health care that flows from the Church’s teaching about the sacredness of human life.
On euthanasia and assisted suicide, the Directives are clear and unambiguous when asserting that “Catholic health care institutions may never condone or participate in euthanasia or assisted suicide in any way” (no. 60).
Critics often portray the Catholic Church’s opposition to assisted suicide as an imposition that restricts personal autonomy. But this fundamentally misunderstands what the Church is actually doing.
The human person with his or her absolute dignity is the justification for all good deeds that ought to be performed in their service. True freedom isn’t simply being able to choose anything whatsoever. It’s the capacity to choose what is genuinely good for us. A “freedom” to destroy oneself, therefore, isn’t really freedom at all, but bondage to despair, fear, and a worldview that measures human worth by productivity or absence of suffering.
Assisted Suicide Reduces Human Freedom
The Church understands that when someone is seriously ill, they face enormous pressures. This includes physical pain, fear of burdening loved ones, medical costs, loss of independence, and the subtle (or not so subtle) suggestions that their continued existence is a problem for others. In such circumstances, the “choice” for death is rarely made in true freedom but under real coercion, whether external or internal.
“We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us,” The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches. “It is not ours to dispose of” (no. 2280). And because life is a precious gift from God, there are profound implications, as outlined in The Directives:
We have a duty to preserve our life and to use it for the glory of God, but the duty to preserve life is not absolute, for we may reject life-prolonging procedures that are insufficiently beneficial or excessively burdensome. Suicide and euthanasia are never morally acceptable options (Part Five, “Issues in Care for the Seriously Ill and Dying; nos. 55-57).
By prohibiting assisted suicide in Catholic healthcare settings, the Church actually removes this terrible option from the table entirely. This liberates patients and families from an agonizing decision they should never have to face. Instead of weighing whether life is “worth living,” they can focus on how to live well in whatever time remains.
Advocates for euthanasia and assisted suicide see “dying with dignity” as “liberation,” believing that a life with pain and suffering lacks meaning. By contrast, Catholic tradition values both the dignity of the human person and the gift of life through the lens of Christ’s redemptive love. The Church knows that suffering is an inescapable aspect of life and that this suffering ultimately unites us to God.
The more our society opens the door to and positively incentivizes assisted suicide, the less free individuals (and now, couples) will be to embrace the trials of the end of life, free of the psychological, moral, and medical pressure to take the “quick and easy” way out.
This article has been reprinted with permission and can be found at hli.org/2026/01/ai-assisted-suicide-sarco-pod.