Rape, paralysis and euthanasia: the case convulsing Spain
In shops, offices and bars across Spain, a single story has been monopolising conversation, said Enrique Aparicio in El Público (Madrid). The case of 25-year-old Noelia Castillo, whose life was ended by euthanasia in a Barcelona hospital last month, has “stirred the entire country”, sparking a fierce debate about an assisted-dying law introduced in 2021.
Castillo had had a troubled life; she'd spent her teen years in state-run foster care, had suffered several sexual assaults, and in 2022 was gang raped by three men. Days after that, she threw herself out of a fifth-floor window. The suicide attempt left her paralysed and in chronic pain with depression: insisting that her life was no longer worth living, she asked that it be ended. However her father, backed by a religious advocacy group called Christian Lawyers, claimed that given her fragile mental state, she was in no position to give meaningful consent to an assisted death.
‘Unnecessary suffering’
It's appalling the way in which Castillo was denied the right to a dignified death, said El País (Madrid). Her euthanasia had been unanimously approved, as the law requires, by two doctors, a lawyer and a review and oversight body; and it had been scheduled to take place on 2 August 2024. But then the legal challenges started to roll in, and it was only on 10 March this year, when the European Court of Human Rights rejected the final appeal by Christian Lawyers, that they came to an end. And so her “unnecessary suffering” was prolonged for a “devastating” 601 days, and in the full glare of media attention.
No, that puts everything the wrong way round, said Javier Redondo in El Mundo (Madrid). The assisted-dying law was supposed to provide a “dignified death” for terminally ill patients languishing “bedridden, paralysed and intubated; in agony”. It was not meant for young people like Castillo, who “lacked hope for the life ahead”. This case has fundamentally shifted the “boundaries of euthanasia”.
‘Abandoned’ by society
Indeed, the noise of this scandal should reverberate “far beyond the borders of Spain”, said Laurent Frémont in Le Figaro (Paris). It lays bare a society that no longer knows how to look after its most needy citizens. At every turn, Castillo was failed by the state: it took her from her family when she was a teenager and put her in foster care; she was still in the state's care when she was gang raped; and finally, instead of providing the psychiatric care she so badly needed, the state granted her a medically assisted death. In short, she was “abandoned by the institution” meant to take her family's place.
We need to be careful here, said Pedro García Cuartango on ABC (Madrid). I myself am morally opposed to euthanasia, and I too view Noelia Castillo's death as a societal failure. Yet we must acknowledge that the assisted-dying law was passed by an absolute majority in parliament and thus has full political legitimacy. We may hate the outcome, but in the clash between the law and our moral convictions, we in the end have to accept the law.