In March, a law unprecedented for Catholic Spain was passed, making euthanasia legal in the country. But its implementation has been hampered by some states and some doctors. For them, the Netherlands is the specter of a practice that has gotten out of hand.
Spain is now the fifth country in the world with a euthanasia law, after the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Canada. But it is not easy to put Spanish law into practice, because health care is organized per state. This means that 17 federal states will have to set up 17 committees to monitor proper compliance with the euthanasia law.
Javier Velasco, President of the Euthanasia Association Dying with dignity, says that in regions where conservative parties rule, implementation of the law is significantly inhibited. His fear is that people who want to make a euthanasia request will in practice soon have to travel to other parts of Spain.
“There may be a back-and-forth trip by people who want to make use of the law, a kind of euthanasia tourism,” says Velasco. “That also happens with abortion. Women have to travel to other federal states for this, because their own region makes it more difficult to implement the law.”
Law is similar to Dutch law
The Spanish euthanasia law, which must come into effect at the end of June, is similar to the Dutch one. The text speaks of people asking for help at the end of their lives, because of “a serious, incurable illness, or a serious, chronic suffering that makes life impossible”.
Regardless of opposing federal states, conservative organizations are still trying to get the law undone through a lawsuit before the Constitutional Court. The president of the medical college in Madrid is also concerned. According to him, the advent of the law means a sliding scale, which causes euthanasia to get out of hand.
For example, due to practice in the Netherlands, elderly people would be afraid of going to a care home for fear of being killed, says doctor Manuel Martínez-Selles. “In the Netherlands and Belgium, euthanasia is performed on disabled children and elderly people with Alzheimer’s,” he says. According to him, professional ethics therefore prohibits doctors from cooperating in the implementation of the law.
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