RIGHTS-VENEZUELA: Euthanasia, a Debate with No Reprieve

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Rubén Armendáriz

CARACAS, Feb 4 2001 (IPS) - The government’s proposal for a health law that allows active euthanasia, without restrictions, triggered a range of outspoken reactions in Venezuela, where broad sectors of society are calling for a careful study of the issues surrounding the legal bill.

The controversy erupted with the publication of a draft of a law under review by the Health Subcommittee of the Presidential Commission for Social Security. The Ministry of Health defends it, the Catholic Church condemns it and current legislation does not explicitly cover it.

Only when the final version is available will President Hugo Chávez study it with the Council of Ministers, and perhaps later this month it will go before the National Assembly (parliament), at which point other sectors could add their voices to the debate.

The draft states that all individuals have the right “to die with dignity, to request their attending physician to perform an appropriate procedure or for related advice, as long as the person is in the final stages of life or presents with a serious, chronic illness that causes suffering.”

The text also indicates that every citizen is free to refuse “extraordinary measures for prolonging life, including prior orders of non- resuscitation, as long as the person is able to exercise his or her right to self-determination and autonomy of will.”

“There is one side of euthanasia that is welcome, wanted and humane,” said minister of Health, Gilberto Rodríguez Ochoa, who considers it “a humane act” to allow people “to die with dignity” when they are in a terminal state or suffer a chronic, painful and irreversible illness.

The Catholic Church, meanwhile, has already launched its campaign against the bill.

“In a country like ours, where life is worth so little, there is so much detachment from the legal norms and widespread violation of them, that putting a bill up for approval of euthanasia is opening the way for a kind of extermination,” monsignor Baltasar Porras, president of the Venezuelan Episcopal Conference, told IPS.

“We cannot turn ourselves into killers wearing the mantel of compassion,” added Porras, pointing out that, beyond ethics, what concerns him as far as the draft legislation is “the number of elderly, with untreated illnesses, and hospitals that have become warehouses for the old and those considered useless.”

Some sectors agree that the life of a patient should not be prolonged against his or her will if the patient suffers a terminal illness.

But jurist Alberto Arteaga, former dean of the Law Faculty at the Central University of Venezuela, stresses that according to Article 407 of the Penal Code active euthanasia is considered homicide and carries a sentence of seven to 10 years in prison.

Arteaga says that such action must be distinguished from what is known as passive euthanasia, “which is nothing more than attempting to facilitate a dignified death, and not taking extraordinary or disproportionate measures when a person is in the terminal phase.”

Doctors are allowed to practice passive euthanasia under Article 28 of the Exercise of Medicine Law.

Ludwig Schmidt, of the Centre for Religious Studies of the Andrés Bello Catholic University, warned that if the limits to euthanasia are not established, “the deaths of many people could be accelerated in order to obtain their organs or for other inappropriate ends.”

Fernando Bianco, meanwhile, president of the Medical Board of the Federal District, told IPS that “what is being proposed is that there would be a voluntary act, on the part of the patient or the family,” and that it would be carried out in cases “of unnecessary prolongation of life when it is known that the patient is terminal.”

“Prolonging that existence is to prolong the pain of everyone,” stated Bianco.

Augusto León, honorary president of the National Centre of Bio- Ethics, considers the attempt to approve active euthanasia an aberration and pointed out that it is only practised in northern Australia. In the Netherlands, it is not punished but it is not legal, while in Colombia efforts to approve legislative bills on the matter have been rejected.

José Besso, president of the Pan-American and Iberian Federation of Critical Medicine and Intensive Care Societies, indicated that euthanasia should be reserved for terminal patients, not for those who have a chance at recovery, and for those whose suffering is only being extended.

The final decision should not be made only by the patient and members of the family, but also by a medical committee and a hospital’s ethics council, Besso stated.