THE RIGHT TO DIE OR THE DEATH OF LAW

By Óscar Méndez Oceguera

The New Laboratory of Legalized Death

On October 10, 2025, Uruguay became the first country in Latin America to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide. With a narrow majority, the Senate approved the law allowing physicians to provoke or facilitate the death of anyone suffering from “unbearable pain” or “incurable disease.”

The press hailed it as a historic milestone, a moral advance, a step forward for freedom. Official speeches repeated the modern catechism: autonomy, dignity, compassion.

But behind those words hides a substitution far deeper than a law: the replacement of natural order by will, of being by desire. A statute has been enacted that destroys the very foundation of Law itself, for it turns into an object of disposal that which constitutes its principle. Life—the source of all rights—has become a matter of contract.

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A Carefully Rehearsed Global Sequence

The Uruguayan gesture is not isolated. It forms part of a carefully rehearsed sequence in Europe and North America: it begins by invoking pity for the terminally ill and ends by justifying the elimination of those who “can no longer enjoy life.”

The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Portugal—all followed the same itinerary, with identical emotional language and increasingly radical results.

In every case, the promise of a humanitarian exception for terminal patients transformed—by an unstoppable logic and progressive reinterpretation—into a system of legally administered elimination that now extends to those with mental disorders or who are simply “tired of living.”

Death ceased to be a limit and became a public service, ever more inclusive.

And now Latin America begins to replicate this architecture. In Mexico, the so-called Ley Trasciende copies almost word for word the Uruguayan arguments: “freedom to choose,” “dignified death,” “medical compassion.” None of these formulas aim to strengthen palliative care or spiritual accompaniment: all are directed toward institutionalizing the power to suppress life in the name of autonomy.

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Freedom Confused with Dominion

The first confusion of our age is to believe that freedom means dominion. Modern man, obsessed with being master of himself, has forgotten that freedom does not consist in being able to do anything, but in being able to do good.

It is not ownership, but participation.

Freedom without truth does not liberate—it dissolves. And when the will ceases to recognize itself as subordinate to the good, it becomes power without measure. The will that kills is no longer free: it is enslaved to fear, pain, or weariness.

There is, therefore, no act more self-contradictory than assisted suicide: it is the negation of freedom in the name of freedom itself.

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The Metaphysical Error of Owning One’s Being

The error stems from a metaphysical root: the idea that man possesses his being (his substance) as he possesses his goods (his accidents).

But no one can own what constitutes him. I do not have my life as I have my belongings: I am my life—my esse.

And what I am, I cannot lawfully destroy.

Man’s relationship to his existence is not one of dominion but of ontological stewardship. To dispose of life is not to exercise a right, but to betray it.

Life does not belong to the individual; it has been entrusted to him. It is not a matter of sovereignty, but of responsibility.

Whoever turns life into property plants the seed of juridical nihilism: if everything I possess I may destroy, then everything that exists may be eliminated.

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The Law That Ceases to Be Law

From this confusion flows the collapse of Law.

For law, if it is to be just, must be founded on the good and not on will. Life is the first good—the presupposition of all norms. Without it, no justice is possible.

Therefore, a law that authorizes the suppression of life is not law but the fiction of legality. It replaces order with procedure, truth with majority.

It is the perfect form of disorder: a system that legislates against its own principle.

What was once called homicide is now called a right; what was once called pity is now called compassionate elimination.

Thus Law dies—not when injustices are committed, but when they are codified.

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Falsified Dignity

Euthanasia’s defenders invoke dignity, but confuse it with comfort.

They believe that a weak or suffering body ceases to be dignified, as if dignity depended on vigor or usefulness.

Yet human dignity is neither gained nor lost—it is inherent to being.

Illness does not degrade it; it reveals it. In fragility shines forth the greatness of what we are: rational creatures, dependent and open to love.

True indignity does not lie in suffering, but in being abandoned.

Hence the law that offers death instead of accompaniment is not compassion but social fatigue—the organized renunciation of a society that no longer endures vulnerability and prefers to conceal it under the name of freedom.

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Betrayed Compassion

Nor is there compassion in killing to avoid pain.

True compassion does not eliminate the sufferer—it accompanies him, embraces him, sustains him, elevates him.

Modern compassion, by contrast, is desperate sentimentalism: unable to give meaning to pain, it erases the sufferer.

The physician ceases to heal and becomes an administrator of despair.

The hospital ceases to be a house of relief and becomes an office for euthanasia.

What is presented as an act of mercy is, in truth, the coldest form of abandonment.

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The Medicine of the Soul: Palliative Care

While laws of death are passed, palliative care—the true human response to suffering—remains scarce and neglected.

Wherever it is practiced, the request to die virtually disappears, for the patient who feels accompanied no longer wishes to die: he wishes to live well.

The sick do not ask for death; they ask not to be alone.

Thus, legislating euthanasia without ensuring palliative care is not compassion but institutional negligence.

It offers a syringe instead of a hand.

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Suffering as Revelation of Being

Suffering, far from being an error to be excised, is the place where man encounters his limit and his soul.

Pain reveals the truth of being—its dependence, its fragility, its openness to the other.

At that edge where finitude is touched, man learns humility and gratitude.

Where the body breaks, the spirit may grow.

Hence cultures that knew how to accompany pain were more human than those that eliminate it.

Ours, instead, has made comfort its only value and thus deems useless all that does not produce pleasure.

From this arises the monstrous notion of disposable humans: lives deemed meaningless once they lose functionality.

The elderly who feel burdensome, the sick who fear impoverishing their families, the poor who do not wish to weigh on the State—all are gently, bureaucratically pushed to disappear.

The society of comfort has turned death into an act of efficiency.

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The Denial of Purpose and the Corruption of Justice

The ultimate root of this phenomenon is the denial of finality.

When the notion of natural end is lost, everything is reduced to technique.

Pain ceases to have meaning; death ceases to be a passage; life ceases to be a mission.

Man, reduced to producer and consumer, is measured by utility, not by being.

But Law cannot survive such logic: if it recognizes no intrinsic ends, it merely regulates appetites.

And where law becomes the servant of desire, justice perishes.

Euthanasia, in its apparent neutrality, enshrines this final nihilism: the belief that man has no destiny higher than his own consent.

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The Neutral State That Decides Who Dies

The State, whose duty is to protect life, disguises itself as neutral and ends up arbitrating who may die.

In the name of autonomy, it administers self-negation.

It is the same principle that permitted abortion and now prepares genetic engineering: the claim to possess the body as a thing.

But the body is not an object—it is the form of the soul.

We do not have bodies; we are bodies.

To treat the body as property is to confuse the person with matter and to open the door to total manipulation.

From there to sanitary totalitarianism is but one step: the power to decide who should live for reasons of utility, cost, or convenience.

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The Law That Dies of Self-Negation

Law, reduced to the will of majorities, ceases to be rational.

A statute that legitimizes assisted suicide turns the State into an accomplice of nihilism.

And a society that calls the destruction of its vital principle a right prepares itself to vanish as a civilization.

For Law dies not when it is violated, but when it is denatured.

Its essence lies not in consensus, but in truth.

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The Purifying Meaning of Limit

Suffering, on the other hand, holds a meaning that transcends all human law.

He who endures it with love discovers the greatness that pleasure never teaches.

He who accompanies the dying learns more about life than he who flees from pain.

He who bears his limit with hope purifies his soul and prepares it for eternity.

In that silent school are forged the virtues that sustain the world: patience, compassion, humility, faith.

To suppress that experience is to erase humanity’s moral apprenticeship.

Euthanasia, more than a medical act, is an amputation of the spirit.

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Barbarism with a Clinical Face

No civilization is possible if man does not accept that life possesses a meaning greater than himself.

He who destroys the limit destroys measure; he who eliminates pain eliminates conscience; he who turns law into an instrument of death signs the death certificate of justice.

The only modernity worthy of the name is not the one that hastens death but the one that teaches how to die humanely.

To legislate the elimination of the weak is not progress: it is barbarism with a clinical face.

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The Final Decision

Life, even in suffering, remains a good.

The law that denies it does not liberate but enslaves; it does not console but abandons; it does not protect but destroys.

When a civilization turns death into a right, it abdicates both its reason and its soul.

For Law lives only while the conviction endures that life deserves defense for its own sake.

When that conviction dies, what remains is not freedom but moral desert.

Upon that choice depends everything we understand by humanity.

A society is defined not by how it treats its strongest, but by how it kills its weakest—even when it does so in the name of freedom.

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In this impasse are at stake Law itself, respect for nature, and even the soul.