Portugal allowed euthanasia: the decision divided the country

The Portuguese Parliament, after a long struggle, legalized euthanasia. The decision to allow the terminally ill to die through medical treatment divided the deeply Catholic country.

After long and heated discussions, Portugal passed a law on Friday legalizing euthanasia for people suffering from severe suffering and terminal illnesses, joining only a handful of countries around the world that allow the practice.

This issue, writes The Guardian, split the deeply Catholic country, and euthanasia was strongly opposed by Conservative President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, known as a devout parishioner of the church.

Under the provisions of the new law, people over the age of 18 will be allowed to apply for euthanasia if they are terminally ill and experiencing unbearable suffering. This will only apply to those suffering from “prolonged” and “unbearable” pain, unless they are deemed mentally ill to make such a decision.

The law will only apply to Portuguese citizens and legal residents and will not apply to foreigners entering the country to receive such assistance.

The euthanasia bill has been approved by the Portuguese Parliament four times in the last three years, but each time has been sent back for revision due to opposition from the president. The final version of the law was passed on Friday with the support of the ruling Socialists, who have an absolute majority in the House of Representatives.

“We are reaffirming a law that has already been overwhelmingly approved several times,” said Socialist MP Isabel Moreira, a vocal supporter of the legalization of euthanasia.

Now the president has a week to promulgate the new law. According to Portuguese media reports, it could come into force by autumn. “We have finally come to the end of a long battle,” MP Moreira told AFP earlier this week.

President Rebelo de Sousa vetoed previous bills due to “overly vague concepts” and later said the language used to describe terminal states was still inconsistent and needed to be clarified.

The new version of the law now provides that euthanasia is allowed only in cases where death “with medical assistance is not possible due to the physical disability of the patient.”

Rebelo de Souza asked lawmakers to clarify who would certify whether a patient was physically incapable of artificially dying, but lawmakers this time refused to change the text.

Issues raised by the president can be resolved by implementing the decrees, said Katarina Martins, leader of the far left bloc.

Rebelo de Souza himself said that the approval of the law “did not become a big drama” and did not lead to the emergence of “constitutional problems.”

But the debate over medically assisted deaths in Portugal is far from over.

“The passage of this law has been relatively fast compared to other major countries,” said Paulo Santos, a member of the euthanasia advocacy group The Right to Die Worthy. He warned that a large number of doctors might raise moral objections to euthanasia, as they did with abortion in 2007.

For their part, critics of euthanasia regret that this issue was not put to a referendum, and hope that the opposition deputies will once again apply to the Constitutional Court with a request to consider the bill.

Euthanasia, reminds The Guardian, is allowed only in a few countries, including the Benelux countries and Spain, neighboring Portugal.