At the same time that children and adults applauded the health workers from the balconies, while doctors and nurses were described as heroes, at the very moment when the struggle for life, for health, seemed to be the center of concern in Spain, the government approved, through the back door and with worrying haste, the law on euthanasia, raising assisted death to the category of a right. The approval of a law with the characteristics of the Spanish one is worrying from all angles and, therefore, its approval, apart from being a failure, should be considered, for all those who recognize the dignity of the human being, an incentive to continue changing the utilitarian and "throwaway" framework that gives rise to a law of these characteristics.
The entry into force of the new law on euthanasia not only decriminalizes the option of taking one's own life (which means euthanasia, even if the expression is more aseptic than throwing oneself out of a window) but, by considering it a right to a service, transforms the "right to die" into an action for which the State must provide the means, both material and "formative". It is shocking if one takes into account the fact that, in Spain, palliative care has no law to protect it: the elimination of life is considered a right, while the care and protection of life is at the mercy of "the market". Today, the development of palliative medicine and palliative care completely shatters the idea that death is accompanied by suffering. Compassion is shown by helping not to suffer and not by helping to die. In fact, as the president of the College of Physicians of Madrid, Manuel Martínez Sellés, points out, "the problem is that the population is being presented with the duality of euthanasia or suffering. But that is not the duality.
Those who consider life as a gift that deserves to be cared for and respected from beginning to end are now faced with the exciting challenge of working to change the current frameworks of interpretation with which public opinion works on this issue. These frameworks of interpretation include such delicate points as the approach to compassion, the concept of "dignified life", the trivialization of death, the commercialization of life or the consideration that progress is nothing more than a mad race to conquer supposed individual rights. In the words of Professor Torralba, "we must all be moved by the conviction that there are truths such as the value of life, which society should not forget".
Forcing doctors and health professionals to work for death and not for the care and improvement of life seriously injures the spinal cord of a healthy and truly humane society whose characteristic should be the attention, care and promotion of the weakest.
As described by one of Omnes' collaborators, Javier Segura, "those who throw the weakest as a burden will walk faster, they may even run, but they will do so towards their own destruction".
