Eutanásia: Reflexões sobre o direito à vida e a uma morte digna sob o enfoque constitucional

Abstract

The right to life is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most important right under the State's protection and protection, and is therefore enshrined in the 1988 Political Charter as an inviolable right. On the other hand, while the constitutional text guarantees the inviolable right to life, it also grants the right to a dignified death, based on the principles of human dignity and the autonomy of will inherent to each individual. Hence, for some time now, discussions have been reverberating in Brazilian society and around the world regarding the possibility of an individual, in a terminal but playful stage, being able to exercise the right to shorten his or her own life, when that life no longer meets any presupposition of dignity, thus avoiding the subject having to endure pain, humiliation and unnecessary embarrassment. It is true that the Federal Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil does not include the possibility of euthanasia, whether active or passive. On the other hand, even in the face of the refusal of the constitutional and infra-constitutional legislator, an in-depth and pedagogical discussion regarding euthanasia in Brazil is necessary, since, on the one hand, legislation, religion, medicine, ethics and bioethics impose limitations and obstacles to euthanasia. On the other hand, there are those who see that, like life, death is a right and not a duty. In this context, life loses its sacred and intangible concept, and its owner, like any other good, can enjoy it, make use of it and, finally, dispose of it, when he assumes that, for fun and in the face of an irreversible clinical condition, driven by unbearable afflictions and pain, supported by the constitutional principles of human dignity and autonomy of will, he may have the power and state indulgence to end his own life.