From the Editorial Staff
The newspaper La Jornada
Monday, September 23, 2024, p. 18
Every person who is not in good physical health should have the right to make decisions about his or her life and receive help from a professional, agreed specialists in different disciplines from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), as well as from private institutions during the extraordinary session of the permanent seminar on bioethics.
Faced with this perspective, they presented a bill proposal to legalize euthanasia and medically assisted death in Mexico City, which will be sent to the Congress of the capital of the country by the Freedom to Die Association.
The initiative seeks to help people who suffer from paraplegia or other critical situations that lead to the interruption of their life project, said specialists from the national university in philosophy, psychology, law and general medicine.
Asunción Álvarez del Río, a professor of psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine, explained that medically assisted death is when a human being, with his mental capacity but with living conditions reduced to a minimum, wishes to exercise his freedom to determine whether he no longer wants to live like that.
The expert in ethical dilemmas explained that the above includes two concepts: euthanasia, understood as medical assistance provided by a health personnel to directly cause death. The other is medically assisted suicide, which consists of receiving assistance from health personnel limited to providing the means and it is the person themselves who carries out the action that causes their death.
They said the aim of the bill is to support patients with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions that are irreversible and incurable, so that they can choose to terminate their life, regardless of their age.
For the speakers, the struggle for life makes sense as long as you can recover your health or functions; maintaining a biological body at all costs is absurd.
Lawyer Pedro Isabel Morales Aché, a member of the Freedom to Die Association, stressed that euthanasia should not be considered illegal or immoral, as many groups think, especially doctors, since one of the main barriers is not the churches, but the health personnel who must be educated.
