Medically assisted death can only take place through euthanasia if assisted suicide is impossible due to the patient’s physical incapacity, says the new diploma that will be voted on in parliament on Friday.
“Medically assisted death can only take place by euthanasia when medical assisted suicide is impossible due to the patient’s physical incapacity”, is stipulated in a new point added to Article 3 of the decree that regulates the conditions under which medical assisted death is not punishable and which Lusa had access to.
This is one of the amendments proposed by deputies to the latest decree approved by parliament and finally rejected by the Constitutional Court at the end of January, although not for this reason.
Among the unconstitutionality pointed out by the judges of Ratton Palace in the latest decree was the fact that the legislature had “created doubt”, in the definition of ‘very intense suffering’, whether the demand for physical, mental and spiritual suffering was cumulative or alternative.
Compared to the last decree, the reference to physical, psychological and spiritual suffering has been completely removed, preserving the terms of the rest of the definition.
In this new text, “suffering of great intensity” is defined as “suffering resulting from a serious and incurable illness or permanent injury of extreme severity, of great intensity, persistent, persistent or permanent and considered unbearable by the person himself”.
Article 9, referring to the ‘execution of the patient’s decision’, states that “the accompanying physician informs and clarifies to the patient the methods available to carry out medically assisted death, namely the self-administration of lethal drugs by the self-administered or administered by a duly qualified physician or health professional, but under medical supervision”, adding the sentence: “when the patient is physically incapable of self-administering lethal drugs”.
From this point on, the phrase “the decision is the sole responsibility of the patient” was removed.
The certificate on medically assisted death will be reviewed by delegates on Friday.
Assisted death is the act that leads to the death of a patient by his will, by the act of a healthcare professional (euthanasia), or by assisted suicide.
In the explanations of vote of the judges of the Constitutional Court, which accompanied the January 30 judgment, in which some norms of the latest decree were deemed unconstitutional, some judges addressed the issue that euthanasia depends on the impossibility of medical assisted suicide.
For example, the chairman of the TC, João Caupers, defended that “euthanasia cannot be a free alternative: its use must depend on the impossibility of assisted suicide”.
“Only in this way can the principle of proportionality be respected, in terms of necessity,” he said.
At the end of January, the Constitutional Court (TC) declared some norms of the decree intended to regulate medically assisted death unconstitutional, following the request for preventive inspection by the President of the Republic.
At the time, the TC believed that it created “an unacceptable lack of definition as to the exact scope” of the decree, concluding that, by characterizing the typology of suffering into “three features (“physical, psychological and spiritual”) connected by the conjunction “and”, two contradictory interpretations of this assumption are plausible and sustainable”.
However, in the same judgment, the TC considered the definitions of “serious and incurable illness” and “definitive injury of extreme seriousness” in that decree to be constitutional, concepts which had cast doubt on the part of the President of the Republic.
The Assembly of the Republic will have to pass a law on medically assisted death for the fourth time, a subject that has already been halted twice after being unconstitutionally discovered by the TC and another by a political veto by the president of the republic.
Source: DN
