Spain registered a total of 766 requests for euthanasia in 2023, which is 24% more than in the previous year. The fear of suffering in the final stage of our lives or the deficit in palliative services could be behind these figures.
This issue has been addressed in ‘Ecclesia al día‘ with the director of the Bioethics Observatory of the Catholic University of Valencia, Julio Tudela, who considers that requests for euthanasia are due to “an anthropological problem that does not allow the person to face suffering”, but in turn could be explained by the lack of a health response for “patients who have chronic suffering”.
In this regard, Tudela has provided a very revealing and terrifying fact, and that is that in Spain 70,000 patients die every year with intense, avoidable pain “because they do not receive the necessary medical attention”.
Given this lack of access to palliative care for incurable patients, health centers offer the provision of euthanasia: “Euthanasia is deliberately causing the death of a patient. In the face of other alternatives, it means that in countries where this practice is approved, its extension is increasing and the requirement for its application is decreasing”, Tudela lamented.
For the doctor, euthanasia goes against the vocation of the health professional “to cure, relieve and prevent”, to suddenly become “an executioner who ends the life of his patient”.
This change of paradigm, he warns, causes “permissiveness to increase not only among patients, but among health professionals. It is a huge problem because when many people approve that a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist participate in an act whose objective is to end the patient’s life, when this is accepted, what is happening to us?,” the expert asked.
Palliative care, a more expensive alternative than euthanasia: “Sixty euros”
Julio Tudela has also emphasized the low cost of requesting euthanasia in countries like Holland compared to the multidisciplinary care required to care for a patient in a terminal state: “Sixty euros costs a euthanasia kit, palliative care is very expensive, you have to accompany the patient many times for months or years, it consumes rehabilitation, it consumes instruments, it consumes personnel, it consumes material, it is expensive. Resources are not dedicated to this item because, with a utilitarian mentality, there is a kind of reluctance to invest resources for a person who is going to die,” he explained.
For this reason, the director of the Bioethics Observatory of the UCV has called on professionals to have “eyes that contemplate the human dignity of the person who suffers in order to invest resources in him when you know that he is not going to be cured, that he is going to die, and what you do is accompany him so that he lives as dignified as possible.”
Involuntary euthanasia in countries such as Holland or Belgium
In the opinion of Tudela, understanding the so-called ‘dignified death’ as euthanasia is a fallacy, since what exists is “dignified life,” and he adds that “contemplating in every person a dignified human being deserving of care and accompaniment like everyone else, supposes an ethical approach that we must spread,” he proclaimed.
In addition, he has denounced that in countries where euthanasia was regularized decades ago, such as Holland or Belgium, “involuntary euthanasia” is being carried out in elderly people over eighty years old residing in nursing homes, according to certain studies.
“This is a response to the slippery slope, when the law is approved it is usually very demanding in the circumstances to grant the application of euthanasia, but the initial restrictions are relaxed. In the end euthanasia is accepted by the population, by the health community, and it is extended to the moment in which you can ask for euthanasia because you are tired of living, you are not sick, you are not depressed, you are not in any pain, but you are tired of living, you ask for euthanasia, and it is granted to you. This is a worrying symptom that our civilization is truly sick,” he warned.
