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  • SOLEDAD VALLE

    Madrid

Thursday, 8 October 2020 - 22:33

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  • Grandstand.

    The fallacy of the euthanasia law

Neither the right to euthanasia, nor decriminalization.

The Bioethics Committee

is opposed to raising euthanasia or assisted suicide to the category of right

and including them, as well as one more public benefit, within the portfolio of health services.

"Legalizing euthanasia or assisting suicide

implies starting a path of devaluation of the protection of human life

whose borders are very difficult to foresee, as the experience of our environment shows us," says the document.

The report of the consultative body of the Government on Bioethics

arrives in full processing of the bill of the socialist party

announced as the recognition of a new right: that of euthanasia.

Thus, the unanimous position of the twelve members of the Committee is far from supporting this new regulation.

The report asks "if decriminalization arises from an action of solidarity towards those who suffer from illness and disability or, on the contrary, from

the lack of prior solidarity towards them

that is capable of promoting the aid and support that allows them develop your own personal life project with a mitigation of burdens ".

They refer to "the slippery slope" as a risk that would be "both in patients who

end up requesting euthanasia under the conviction that, in their clinical situation, it is the only possible alternative

for society and in the use of it by part of the public authorities in attention to the cost of health care ".

In this sense, they allude to the works of

Javier Gafo, one of the fathers of Bioethics in Spain

, who pointed out: "The worrying consequence of the decriminalization of euthanasia is that what is granted to the patient as a right becomes subjectively an obligation in the face of frequent associated economic and family problems ".

The response given by the Bioethics Committee to the unbearable suffering that leads some patients to request death is sedation.

In this way they opt for a medical solution instead of a legal one, which would be decriminalization, according to

Federico de Montalvo

, president of the Bioethics Committee of Spain.

The Committee proposes "the

protocolization of the use of palliative sedation in specific cases

of refractory existential suffering."

For this, it considers necessary "the

universalization of palliative care

and the improvement of measures and resources for social and health support, with special reference to support for mental illness and disability."

In addition, they point to the need to "undertake that path immediately and not to proclaim a right to end one's life through a public benefit."

In the plenary session held by the Bioethics Committee in March, it was agreed to

prepare the report on euthanasia at the initiative of the advisory body itself

.

The document was approved on September 30 in plenary session and the study and reflection work was carried out during the pandemic, which brought several members of this group to the hospital.

In this context, the text concludes: "Responding with euthanasia to the" debt "that our society has contracted with our elders after such events does not seem the true path to which

an ethic of care, responsibility

and reciprocity

calls us

and intergenerational solidarity "

While the euthanasia law overcame the debate on the amendments to the whole presented by the Popular Party and Vox, on September 10, in the Congress of Deputies.

Now he is

waiting for the group of the presentation to be appointed

, within Parliament, where the processing of the legislative text will continue.

What is stated in the report of the Committee, as an advisory body with consultative functions, is not binding.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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