“We are committed to the right to palliative care and a dignified death. That is why today we will add urgency to the processing of the bill that establishes the right to euthanasia in Chile, through a process of express, free and informed consent,” said the president during his first public account before Parliament.
In Chile, the President of the Republic has the power to establish the rate of processing of bills in Congress, where the project entered in 2011 and since then awaits its second procedure in the Upper House, which since April 2021 has not deals with regulations.
The regulation establishes a legal framework so that a patient with a terminal illness can decide how to end his life. Only people over 18 years of age who “have an incurable, irreversible and progressive disease, with no possibility of responding to curative treatments and with a limited life expectancy,” as established, may enjoy this right.
Boric reported on this decision during his first public account to the Nation, an act that takes place every year before Congress at its headquarters in the city of Valparaíso, and in his case he had to face it less than three months after having assumed power on March 11.
“We came to govern with the mandate to specify an agenda of changes. It is our duty to respond to the uncertainties faced by millions of Chilean men and women living every day in a country that lacks a solid foundation of social rights,” the president added.
The euthanasia project also establishes that the patient must be conscious at the time the right requests it or, in cases of unconsciousness or deprivation of mental faculties, have previously declared it through an advance directive document.
He will be certified by a psychiatric doctor to guarantee his mental faculties and must “express his will in an express, reasoned, unequivocal manner and free from any pressure.”
In Latin America, only Colombia decriminalized euthanasia in 1997. In Mexico there is the so-called “good dying” law, which authorizes the patient or his family to request that life not be prolonged by artificial means, while in Uruguay Congress discusses a project on euthanasia.
The entrance Boric gives urgency to the bill that establishes the right to euthanasia in Chile was first published in diary TODAY.
