“We are all going to die, but the way of dying that I chose seems wonderful to me.” Laura Fernández Abalde’s last wish was fulfilled: she decided herself what her final trip would be like. And he did it, the same way he lived his 67 years: fighting. This activist for the right to a dignified death managed to bend even the extremely guaranteeing procedures of the Ministry of Health: compared to the 40 days that, at least, it takes in Galicia to apply euthanasia from the first request, Laura got it in just half the time. There was a reason for such urgency. His terminal urethral cancer was too fast to wait for the bureaucracy to meet its deadlines. But the pressure worked and Laura was able to leave as she wanted. “I never expected an end to life as beautiful as this,” he recorded in a farewell video for the Right to Die with Dignity (DMD) association.
Laura’s situation came to light on November 10 through information from elDiario.es. In it, this woman from the parish of Beade, Vigo, a neighborhood activist and, since 2006, a member of DMD, told from her room in palliative care how the severe urethral melanoma she suffered from was at risk of ending her life before the Xunta approved her euthanasia. He requested it on October 30, five days after entering the Meixoeiro hospital from the emergency room. He arrived with severe abdominal pain and tests confirmed metastasis. Laura had no doubts about what she wanted, but it was not possible for her to ask for it before.
From there, the bureaucracy imposed its deadlines. The law regulating euthanasia (LORE) establishes a period of fifteen days between the first and second request, after which the case is studied. In Galicia, as the Ministry of Health responded at the time, completing “a complex procedure, strictly regulated in the steps and procedures” by the LORE requires “a minimum” of forty days since there is no such thing as what they defined as an “abbreviated process.”
The Xunta repeated that same response four days later, when the case had been picked up by other media and provoked a “battery of parliamentary initiatives” from the PSdeG so that “no one else” would die waiting for euthanasia. In Galicia, in 2023, 14 people had died while waiting, as many as those who carried their decision to the end. Another ten abandoned along the way.
This persistence of Sanidade found a quick response from DMD, who considered that “of course” there was the possibility of shortening the wait for their partner, something that in 2022 was done in Spain on 82 occasions, 15% of the total according to the data. from the Ministry of Health itself, which estimated the average state wait at 27 days, 13 less than in Galicia. The opposite, the association said, would make the law stop being “a guarantee” and become “an obstacle for those people with a very limited life prognosis.” Like Laura’s.
However, while this debate reached the public sphere, in the health area things were moving. The day after that exchange of statements, on Friday the 15th, Laura received the call she had been waiting for and which confirmed that her request had been accepted, just when – according to the official schedule – she should still be making the second request. After the weekend, this Monday he closed everything with his doctors. There would be no more waiting: euthanasia would be applied on Tuesday, at 9 in the morning. Laura expired minutes before 10. She did so, according to DMD, “laughing and surrounded by her people.”
The importance of the living will
Before, just as she wanted to organize her own trip, Laura also recorded her farewell. “People don’t understand it, but I have been thinking and defending euthanasia, the law of dignified death for many years,” he says in the video recorded to be distributed by DMD after his death, and with which he aims to raise awareness about this fight.
“The living will will reflect what things you would want when you head “I can’t decide.” That, he says, avoids problems both for families, “who will not be able to decide on euthanasia,” and for doctors: “this way they know what life values you had.”
Laura felt like “a lucky person” since she joined the DMD in 2006. While some people are “delighted” with life insurance, what gave her peace of mind was belonging to that entity: “anything that has “What to do with death, I know I can consult it with someone.”
As a last request, he addressed both the Ministry of Health and the autonomous communities so that they “take palliative care into account much more than they have.” And a political message: “I would ask people, when they go to vote, to vote for those who support these causes and not those who restrict and then spend on things that do not benefit us.”
Laura did not want to wait and that is why she announced that, as soon as she received confirmation, euthanasia would be “depending on how she is, today or tomorrow.” For her, “being here with my people and telling them: ‘Well, it was wonderful living with you, although sometimes there were some disagreements’” before falling asleep would be “a highlight” to her life. A brooch like “no Hollywood movie” could give him.
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