Euthanasia in Spain
On December 13, 1984, the DMD association under the number 57889 was registered within the Ministry of the Interior, legalizing a citizen movement to respect the freedom of the individual at the end of their life.
Gómez, a man from Santander with leukemia, published that same year of 1984 an opinion forum in the newspaper El País titled Dare to die gives life.
As he did not get legal permission for this assisted suicide, he asked for the collaboration of eleven people so that each one of them did a part of the process that would lead him to take his own life and thus protect them from being prosecuted.
[14] A similar case was the one that happened to Pedro Martínez, a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), because the medical team that treated him in Seville refused to sedate him, claiming that he was not dying.
[15] Subsequently, up to eleven autonomous communities passed laws for the terminally ill, which recognized their right to renounce treatment and receive final sedation.
[16] In 2005, Dr. Luis Montes Mieza — at that time the emergency coordinator of the Severo Ochoa Hospital in Leganés — and Dr. Miguel Ángel López Varas were investigated by the Department of Health of the Community of Madrid, led by Manuel Lamela Fernández, due to two anonymous complaints in which they were accused of high-dose sedation in terminally ill patients in the Emergency Service of the Severo Ochoa Hospital.
In January 2008, the courts closed the case by ratifying the dismissal was already determined in June 2007 and suppressed the legal basis that referred to the malpractice of the defendants.
He was sentenced to one year in prison for administering intravenous potassium chloride, ending the life and suffering of an 82-year-old woman who expressly requested her death due to her irreversible pain.
[19] In April 2017, José Antonio Arrabal, sick with ALS, committed suicide and recorded himself with a camera so that there would be proof that he had done it to end his suffering since the doctors who treated him considered that he was not in a terminal situation.
[20] In April 2019, María José Carrasco, sick with Multiple Sclerosis for 30 years, ended her life with the help of her husband Ángel Hernández.
[21][22] This event was the germ of a greater follow-up and popular mobilization in favor of a euthanasia law in Spain, which had been claimed for years without success.
The Council of Medical Associations of Catalonia (CCMC), although it was in favor of the law,[32] warned that the registry of professional conscientious objectors "may not guarantee the preservation of this constitutional right."
An informed and repeated petition process must first be carried out over time, in a context of serious and incurable chronic and disabling illness, which causes intolerable suffering.
At some point in this process, the health professional who handles the case could come to consider that the person does not have the understanding or autonomy to decide, without this having to imply a legal incapacity, and would have to complain to the evaluation commission in charge in each autonomous community.
