The head of a controversial assisted-suicide group in Switzerland says he will seek legal permission to help a Canadian woman and other healthy people like her kill themselves, raising startling new issues in the emotional debate over euthanasia.

Betty Coumbias, an elderly Vancouver resident, has indicated she wants to die alongside her husband, George, who suffers from severe heart disease.

Involving healthy individuals would dramatically extend the boundaries of assisted suicide, usually thought of as a way for the terminally ill to avoid an otherwise painful, uncomfortable death.

If successful, the Swiss group, Dignitas, would essentially be aiding in a suicide pact, charged one Canadian critic, while a Toronto-based euthanasia advocate says people have the right to choose the time of their death, whether sick or not.

Ludwig Minelli, director of Dignitas, said in a recent e-mail to Mr. and Mrs. Coumbias that he plans to ask officials of the Canton of Zurich, the local state government, to give doctors the authority to issue lethal drugs to healthy people, after they have been counseled by his organization.

The human-rights lawyer said he is likely to be turned down at that level, but would then appeal to the Administrative Court of Zurich and, if necessary, to the Federal Court of Switzerland.

The challenge does not relate to a particular Dignitas member, “but if we will win, the result would also be decisive for your case,” he told the couple in a message copied to the National Post.

Mr. Minelli described the unusual wishes of the Canadian woman and her husband in a recent British radio interview.

“She told us, here in my living room, ‘If my husband goes with Dignitas, I would go at the same time with him,’ ” he told the BBC.

“This would constitute some problems for us, especially also for a Swiss physician (who would have to prescribe the lethal drugs) and we will now probably go to the courts to clear this question.”

Mr. Coumbias declined comment on the topic, saying by e-mail that he and his wife are refusing interviews.

But a 2007 documentary on Dignitas by John Zaritsky, an Oscar-winning Canadian filmmaker, followed the couple, both 71 at the time, in their initial attempts to arrange a joint assisted suicide.

Mrs. Coumbias explains in the documentary, The Suicide Tourist, why she would take her own life despite being generally healthy.

“From the day we got married, [my husband] was all my life,” she tells Mr. Minelli. “I love my two daughters, but I love him more, and I don’t think I can face life without him, and since we read about Dignitas, we felt what would be better than to die together, you know, to die in each other’s arms?”

The film, broadcast on CTV more than a year ago, then shows the couple meeting with a Swiss doctor, who refuses to prescribe the required drugs to either husband or wife, saying that even Mr. Coumbias’s illness was not serious enough to justify assisted suicide.

While contrary to criminal law in Canada and most other Western nations, assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland. Mr. Minelli is a vocal proponent of the practice and welcomes clients from other countries at Dignitas.

Although the concept was originally advocated as an escape for the very sick, he has argued that it should be an option for anyone who feels they can no longer go on, and has the mental capacity to make the decision. Mr. Minelli says he has helped in the suicide of several people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.

Assisted suicide for healthy individuals, though, is such a dramatic step it could actually backfire and turn people against the whole concept, said Margaret Somerville, an ethics professor at McGill University who opposes euthanasia generally.

“We lose the gravitas of death,” she said of such a scenario. “Death is no longer put in a moral context.”

People sometimes want to die after losing a spouse because of pure loneliness, but the condition is not irreversible, argued Prof. Somerville. She recalled a doctor telling her at a conference in the Netherlands, which has a similar liberal approach to assisted suicide as Switzerland, about how she gave a lethal injection to an elderly woman who had repeatedly asked to die after her husband had passed away. Prof. Somerville said she asked the physician if anyone had suggested simply buying the lonely woman a cat.

“She said, ‘No, but what a remarkable idea. Next time we’ll try that.’ ”

Ruth Von Fuchs, head of the Right to Die Society, defended the Canadian couple’s plans, however, saying that some people do not see life as an obligation or “indentured servitude” that must be continued no matter what.

When life starts to slide inexorably downhill, people should have the right to end it if they want, she said.

As for Mr. Minelli, Ms. Von Fuchs said she has met him and finds him to be “a very altruistic and caring person, and conscientious.”

In a conference presentation last year, the lawyer said that Dignitas will talk to suicidal people about actually continuing with life and estimated that 70% of the group’s members, once they know assisted suicide is an option, never actually take advantage of the services.

But, he said, “we must be prepared to offer professionally supervised assisted suicide to those people whose problems cannot be solved, even after intense discussion with non-judgmental people free from any paternalism, whether medical, religious or governmental.”

National Post