SÃO PAULO, Brazil – As the new members of the Uruguayan Congress began their work in February after the October of 2024’s elections, a bill aiming at decriminalizing euthanasia has been quickly introduced and will apparently end up being approved, maybe even this year.

The Bill is being mainly promoted by Federico Preve, a lawmaker and a member of the left-wing Frente Amplio, the same party of the President Yamandú Orsi. The proposition is also backed by the Colorado Party and legislators of other political parties, including right-wingers. Its promoters believe that they will have enough votes to pass it during the present legislature.

They will probably receive large political support from Uruguayans. A survey conducted in 2020 showed that 82 percent of them thought euthanasia should be allowed. In that same year, a Bill to legalize euthanasia was introduced by Congressman Ope Pasquet. It was approved by the Chamber of Deputies in October of 2022, but it was never put to vote in the Senate.

During the discussions among the deputies, experts in different fields were invited to share their views with them, including members of anti-euthanasia groups. One of the most engaged campaigners against the Bill’s approval was Miguel Pastorino, a theologian with a PhD in philosophy who teaches at the Catholic University of Uruguay.

An expert in bioethics, Pastorino is part of a multidisciplinary group that has been struggling to impede euthanasia being adopted in Uruguay. As he explains, he is in a better position to do so than the members of the Uruguayan clergy (although he thinks this time the Bill will end up being approved.)

“Uruguay has been a secular country for over 100 years. If the Church defends a particular view, the people will do the opposite just because,” he told Crux.

More than half of the Uruguayans have no religion and only 33 percent are Catholic. According to Pastorino, the real percentage of churchgoers amounts only to 5 percent. That’s why he and his colleagues have always used only lay arguments.

“If you’re debating with an atheist, it doesn’t matter for him or her what Jesus said or what the Bible says about life and death. Many Catholics fail to understand it,” he said.

That doesn’t mean that Catholics cannot or should not express their opinions, he said. In fact, Cardinal Daniel Sturla, the Archbishop of Montevideo, has been giving interviews in which he opposed the potential legalization of euthanasia.

“We, of course, are always defenders of life, of the protection of life, from the moment of conception until natural death. We believe this is a mistake and that it is also playing into an issue that is fundamental to us Uruguayans, given the reality of our country, which is to always defend life,” Sturla told Radio Montecarlo last week.

Even bishops tend to use more humanitarian and less religious arguments in public debates like that in Uruguay, Pastorino said. He himself has recommended that to the clergy in the past.

“Even so, it’s common that pro-euthanasia activists accuse us of basing our ideas on religious precepts, as a communication strategy,” he said.

Since 2020, on numerous occasions he has taken part in discussions in universities about euthanasia. He said no fellow contender changed his or her mind about the theme itself, but many of them changed their minds about him.

“They expected I would be some kind of Catholic taliban. But in our team there are people from different religions and even atheists,” he said.

Pastorino explained that the current pro-euthanasia wave comes from the post-modernist left-wing, which he defined as “highly individualistic.”

“They believe it’s fundamental to defend that it’s each one’s right to decide if his or her life should be abbreviated due to a serious medical condition,” he said. “But they don’t understand that there are social and psychological issues behind that decision.”

Uruguay has the highest suicide rate in Latin America, with elderly men as the major victims. Depression is an epidemic among that same social segment.

“Some social sectors are totally excluded. They already suffer a kind of social euthanasia. The exclusion of the poor would culminate with clinical euthanasia,” Pastorino argued.

If there’s an option to simply die, many senior citizens would prefer to do so in order to “avoid being a burden to other people,” he added. In that distorted perspective, altruistic are those who prefer not to live.

“But taking care of our elders, of those who took care of us when we were babies, makes us humans,” he added.

Pastorino thinks that until now the debate hasn’t been rigorous enough in Uruguay.

In surveys, he said, the interviewers usually ask something like: “Would you prefer to suffer or to die in peace?”

“Of course, nobody wants to suffer. But nobody wants to die. If you ask them: ‘Do you prefer to alleviate your pain or to die?,’ people will prefer to keep alive,” he argued.

Most Uruguayans don’t know much about the possibilities of hospice care, which is quite widespread and accessible in the nation. In one interview, Cardenal Sturla mentioned Hospice San Jose, created years ago by a group of Catholics.

Pastorino’s group supported a Bill, a few years ago, to regulate hospice care in Uruguay. It was approved, but it still needs to be detailed in order to improve the people’s access to such a service.

“So, people support euthanasia, but when we talk to them about all that, they begin to have doubts and many times change their opinion. Ignorance is the worst problem,” he said.

The current Bill is very similar to the 2020 one, Pastorino said. It establishes that mentally fit adults who suffer from one or more chronic, incurable, or irreversible pathologies or conditions that seriously impair their quality of life may be eligible.

Those who are feeling unbearable pain are the focus of the project, which has the goal of ensuring that all people have the right to a “painless, peaceful, and dignified death.”

The patient’s doctor is in charge of carrying out a first analysis, after the person requests to undergo euthanasia. The doctor must present to the patient all available treatments, including hospice care. After that, the case is evaluated by a second doctor. The patient is interviewed again and must ratify his request once more.

Pastorino said there are gaps and ill-formulated elements in the Bill that would allow, for instance, a patient with a chronic disease to undergo euthanasia now even though he or she still has a life expectancy of 20 years.

The Bill also lacks a requirement that is present is euthanasia laws in several countries, the exigency of an evaluation of the patient by a multidisciplinary group, including psychologists.

“If we’re called to discuss it in Congress, we’ll try at least to include such elements in the project,” Pastorino said.