Parliament debates this Thursday, for the third time, medically assisted deathwith projects from PS, BE, IL and PAN, seven months after the second veto and without knowing what Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa will do.
Under discussion in the plenary session of the Assembly of the Republic there will also be a draft resolution by Chega that intends to hold a referendum on the subject.
All four bills remove the “fatal illness” requirement as a criterion for decriminalizing medically assisted death.. PS, BE and the Liberal Initiative propose euthanasia in situations of “extremely serious definitive injury” or “serious and incurable disease”. Regarding this last criterion, the PAN establishes the requirement of “serious or incurable disease”.
The latest version of the decree, approved in November 2021, had the following wording of the conditions for the legal exercise of assisted medical death: “By decision of the person, of legal age, whose will is current and reiterated, serious, free and informed, in a situation of intolerable suffering, with definitive injury of extreme gravity or incurable and fatal disease, when it is practiced or assisted by health professionals.
However, in other parts of the decree, for the first time, instead of “incurable and fatal disease”, the expression “serious or incurable disease”, which in one of the regulations was defined as “serious disease that endangers life , in an advanced and incurable phase”, appeared for the first time, progressive, incurable and irreversible, causing suffering of great intensity”.
Of the initiatives to be debated this Thursday, IL’s is the one that introduces the most changes with respect to this last final textproposing that the doctor be assigned “sequentially, from a list of doctors specialized in the pathology that affects the patient, who express interest in being part of this list, drawn up by the Ordem dos Médicos, taking into account a criterion of territoriality that promotes the geographical proximity of the specialist to the patient”.
Liberals advance with a period of reflection “not less than two days, during which psychological monitoring is mandatory”, between the programming of medically assisted death and “the administration of lethal drugs”.
Contrary to what happens with the diplomas for access to metadata or for health emergencies, which the President of the Republic has already made known that he will send to the Constitutional Court, in the case of euthanasia n.It is not yet known what Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa will do after his probable parliamentary approval.
From the beginning of the process, the head of state argued that there should be a wide and long debate in society Portuguese, but he always refused to reveal his personal position and anticipate a decision before obtaining a degree.
The first time that the deputies tried to legislate on the matter was in May 2018 but the PS, BE, PAN and PEV projects ended up failing.
Two years later, the same parties presented the projects again, to which IL joined, then represented by the sole deputy, João Cotrim de Figueiredo.
The diploma, approved by a majority in the Assembly of the Republic, went to Belém on February 18, 2021 and on the same day, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa sent it to the Constitutional Court for preventive inspection.
About a month later, the TC did not comply with the law and the President vetoed the diploma, which returned to Parliament, from which a new final text was approved by a large majority in November of the same year, with some changes, namely, a new initial definitions article to clarify concepts, eight in total, from medically assisted death to “definitive injury”, serious or incurable illness.
The document returned to Belém at a time when the political crisis was already installed after the fall of the State Budget for 2022 and the legislative elections scheduled for January 30.
At the end of November, with the parliament already dissolved, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa politically vetoed the law, noting that the new text used different expressions to define the type of diseases required and defended that the legislator should choose between the “only serious diseases”, the “serious and incurable disease” and the “incurable and fatal disease”.
In the event that the Assembly of the Republic wants to “even opt for the waiver of the requirement that the disease be fatal, and therefore expand the permission for medically assisted death,” according to Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, it will opt for an “action more radical”. or drastic vision” and questioned whether this corresponds to the “dominant sentiment in Portuguese society”.
With a new parliament elected in the January legislative elections, PS and PSD have already announced that they will give their deputies freedom to vote, with IL, BE, PAN and Livre positioning themselves in favor of decriminalization and Chega and PCP against it.
Source: Observadora
