Next Saturday, June 25, it will be exactly one year since the historic euthanasia law. Twelve months ago, Spain became the sixth country in the world to decriminalize aid in dying as one more benefit of the public health system, after years of struggle by patients and activists such as Ramón Sampedro, Fernando Cuesta or Luis Montes. Their names resounded strongly in the Congress of Deputies when the law was definitively approved, with the votes in favor of all parties except PP, Vox and UPN.
Since then, they have practiced between 150 and 200 euthanasiasaccording to the calculations of the association Right to die with dignity (DMD), based on the data collected from its partners or the people who contact the group or published by the autonomous communities. However, not all the territorial administrations have made the statistics public these days, which has prevented the Ministry of Health Disseminate, for the time being, the full balance of the first year of application of the law.
Even so, although the data is incomplete, it does allow us to glimpse that the implementation has been very unevendepending on the territory. Catalonia and Basque Country are at the forefront in number of accepted requests, especially the first, with 60 euthanasias performed and 25 in Euskadi, while Andalusia and Madrid “have dragged their feet & rdquor ;, in the words of Javier Velasco, president of DMD. In the first, 11 euthanasias have been carried out and in the second, 19, despite the fact that they have a large population. In the Valencian Community there have been 13 and in Extremadura only 1.
Guarantee Commission
And it is that Andalusia did not create the Commission Guarantee and Evaluation, which must authorize each request, until last December, while in Madrid it was not ready until October, when the law set the deadline for entry into force, that is, June 25 last year. East delay has contributed to the fact that in both autonomies much less euthanasia has been practiced and that some patients have dead waiting for the green light. For example, the case of Estrella López, who took 10 months to get aid to die in Andalusia, is notorious, when the law states that the outcome should not last more than 40 days from the start of the application.
And not only the delay in naming the commissions explains the disparity of data. In Catalonia and Euskadi there has been more diffusion to the law both among citizens and among health professionals who have to apply it, an action that has contributed to more requests and fewer delays in the process due to Doubts among healthcare teams, according to DMD. In addition, both administrations have appointed referentsthat is, professionals who know the law well and who are consulted by doctors who do not know what to do when faced with a request or how to carry out the entire process.
And Catalonia, Euskadi, Navarra, the Canary Islands, the liberalization of schedules of the health workers who receive a request for help in dying, given that, especially in Primary Care, “they are overwhelmed with work and thus it is impossible to spend the hours needed to talk to the patient or go to their home”. According to the president of Right to Die with Dignity, there are professionals who “have objected to more for convenience, because it cannot assume that extra workthat for ethical reasons, that is why it is important, to facilitate the application of the law, that the agendas of the toilets who receive a request be released & rdquor ;.
conscientious objection
In fact, it is striking that while in Catalonia, with 137 requests, there have only been 167 conscientious objectors In Madrid, with 19 euthanasias attended – the community does not reveal how many have been requested and denied – there are 2,820 objectors.
The number of requests, although it is unknown exactly, has not surprised the Right to Die with Dignity, a citizen movement that was born almost 30 years ago to promote respect for individual freedom in the final process of life. “We knew that there weren’t going to be many requests but even so, it is a right that those patients who meet the requirements have, “says Velasco. The law states that those who have a “serious, chronic and disabling condition or a serious and incurable disease, causing intolerable suffering & rdquor ;. Right to Die predicts that next year, once the law is more established, there will be more requests and fewer delays.
Related news
In Catalonia, the majority of applications have been made by people with neurodegenerative diseases, with more than 71 years and in primary care centers. And in the private sphere, throughout Spain, there have hardly been any cases.