MIAMI, United States. – Doctors Miguel Ángel Ruano and Lucio Enríquez, from the Free Cuban Medical Guildquestioned the right to euthanasia included in the draft Public Health Law presented to the deputies of the Health and Sports and Constitutional and Legal Affairs commissions, this Sunday.
“We do not understand how it comes out of nowhere, without a debate in a country where there is no experience on this issue,” Dr. Ruano told CubaNet. “In other countries of the world where euthanasia is officially implemented, debates are created that arise from cases in which the law does not provide what to do with patients with whom all treatments have failed (…). The time comes when there are no more treatment solutions and debates are created and a law comes out ”, he explained.
He also indicated that this has not been the case in Cuba. “We have the hypothesis that Cuba has always wanted to go to the advanced wing (as with vaccines at the time) and now it wants to go to the advanced in the case of euthanasia,” the doctors pointed out.
“That is why we wonder if it is pure circus to present itself to the world as an advance,” they added.
For Ruano, a euthanasia law is “ethically questionable in a country where the patient does not have all the guarantees of adequate treatment. The euthanasia law has been passed in nations that have strong health systems. (…) This is not for a country where there are no guarantees of the most basic, which is the treatment that prevents patients from reaching a terminal state, ”he asserted.
For the doctor, what the National Assembly of Popular Power is doing is “trying to dignify death in a country where life is not dignified.”
The first thing must be, he says, that Cubans “have a dignified life, that they have a health system in which they lack nothing; and then we could talk about a dignified death. But first, let’s talk about a dignified life because Cubans don’t have it on the island,” he lamented.
Specifically, he pointed out, it would be necessary to “guarantee up-to-date, cutting-edge, personalized treatments, so that the patient does not actually reach the state of having to request euthanasia.”
Euthanasia has only been approved in one Latin American country (Colombia, 2015) and in another six in the world: the Netherlands (2002), Belgium (2002), Canada (2016), Melbourne (Australia 2017), Spain (2021) and New Zealand (2021).
Receive information from CubaNet on your cell phone through WhatsApp. Send us a message with the word “CUBA” on the phone +525545038831, You can also subscribe to our electronic newsletter by giving click here.
