EUTHANASIA AND ASSISTED SUICIDE

Societies are based on the principle of the inalienable right to life, and indeed States have a duty to preserve life. Euthanasia is based on a human principle: to shorten the unnecessary suffering of the person undergoing a process of terminal deterioration. Of course, different cultures and different bodies of law have different assessments of the subject. The right to assisted suicide or to a so-called «dignified death» generates debates: those in favor ask why, if each person has the freedom to make decisions about his or her own life, the most important decision of all is prevented in a final phase. Those who are against it postulate the deviations that its legalization would provoke: for example, the disinvestment or even elimination of palliative care, considered as an unnecessary expense, and the possible helplessness of a patient in the care of a family overcome by suffering. It is even argued that there is a contradiction between euthanasia and physicians´ Hippocratic oath.