- Legalized euthanasia in the Spanish State? There are positive testimonies here and there from experts of precedents in Europe and America. In Belgium, as in many other places, euthanasia was practiced in silence, because when it was illegal, he was also afraid to ask the deer.
It's very different now. The professionals who work in a “Consultation Ethics Center” in Liège say that the patients who approach them are afraid of not being taken seriously, not to talk about death at all, because they only want that, and they feel very relieved when they see that their request is treated with benevolence. If this does not happen, doctors know that it is not necessary to move forward, because some of those who have reached the center seek palliative care, after all.
The conditions for accepting the request for euthanasia are precise and strict: an unbearable illness, an unbearable suffering and a repeated request. They offer help to those who are in these quincas and when, in repeated interviews, it is clear that the demand is not the result of external pressures, if the patient and the doctors see that euthanasia is the only reasonable solution, then they carry it out.
Euthanasia is seen as a permission for people to end it massively, as if practitioners were pursuing it according to their own interests or as if they were aiming to reduce social security costs.
Four or five years ago, in a climate of turmoil surrounding the case of a doctor at the hospital in Bayonne, we saw on the street young people in the form of whims collecting signatures against euthanasia. One of them replied that he would like a doctor at a time when he is ill with him; and the other surprised him: “But you are in good health...” So intelligent... People view euthanasia as a permission to end it massively, as if those who practice it were meant to do so according to their interests or to reduce the costs of social security. Similar arguments are used by the French authorities, whose sad reality is that those who want to live are increasingly too late and poorly cared for; some have recently died, and there are indications that it is because of the restrictions on health services.
Euthanasia can be a tool to live quietly, says a wife who faces a serious illness for the third time in her life. “I would like to say something very important. When I first became ill, I was 19 years old, and after two months of chemotherapy I couldn’t stand it anymore, I asked my father to put me in touch with a doctor who could stop everything. I spoke to him on the phone and he said:‘I know your record, and you will do well, but if things go wrong, I will be with you.’ And look, this promise of death made me cling and gave me the right to live.”