Wed Feb 1, 2023 – 2:20 pm EST
(LifeSiteNews) – The Portuguese Constitutional court declared a law that introduced legal euthanasia unconstitutional.
The court argued in its decision that “an intolerable lack of definition was thus created as to the exact scope of application of the new law.” It further stated that “the conditions under which medically assisted death is legally admissible must be ‘clear, foreseeable and controllable’ (Judgment No. 123/2021), and it is up to the legislator to define them in a way that is certain for all concerned.”
The court did not declare euthanasia itself unconstitutional, but rather the imprecision contained within the text of the legislation. The court noted that the typology of suffering that would be needed to legally euthanize a person described in the law was ambiguous:
In conducting this review, the Court concluded that, since the legislator had decided to characterize the typology of suffering by listing three characteristics (“physical, psychological and spiritual”) linked by the conjunction “and”, two conflicting interpretations of this assumption are plausible and tenable.
In doing so, the legislator gave rise to the doubt, which must be clarified, as to whether the requirement is cumulative (physical
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