“Today, the majority of parliament has testified to people who are sick who have been clamoring for this right for years,” said Socialist Party MP Maria Luisa Carcedo during the final debate.
She cited the case of Ramon Sampedro, a paralyzed Spaniard who recorded his assisted suicide in 1998, a story later told in the 2004 Oscar-winning film, “The Sea Inside”.
Spain’s euthanasia law allows people with “serious chronic illnesses, with no chance of recovery and in unbearable suffering” to request the assistance of a doctor to end their lives, according to the bill published on the parliament’s website.
Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands already allow euthanasia under certain conditions, Reuters reported. A Portuguese court this week declared a euthanasia law unconstitutional, the office of the Portuguese president said.
The government’s Socialist Party promoted the law and won support from smaller left-wing parties and other parties. The two main conservative parties were opposed to it.
Thursday’s vote was the final step towards becoming law.
‘A right, not an obligation’
Congresswoman Lourdes Mendez, of the extreme right-wing party Vox, told parliament: “You elected death instead of the medicine” and cast a vote in Spain’s Constitutional Court.
Parliamentary José Ignacio Echaniz, of the main conservative opposition party, the Popular Party, told parliament that the new law “would cause distrust between parents and children. Today, the weakest in society have reason to fear”.
But Spanish journalist Asun Gomez Bueno disagrees. She lost her husband, Luis de Marcos, in 2017, due to multiple sclerosis, at the age of 50. He wanted assisted suicide or euthanasia, and since then, she has become one of the main defenders of the new law.
“In the last four years of his life, (Luis) was totally paralyzed, but he kept his cognitive ability intact,” Gomez Bueno told CNN. “There was no treatment to relieve his pain. The pain was so terrible that he didn’t want to sleep at night because he knew that the next day it would get worse.”
“I don’t want anyone else to go through the same hell he suffered,” said Gomez Bueno. “Euthanasia is a right that can only be requested by the person involved. It is a right, not an obligation ”.