Since 1991, every October 1st is also celebrated as the International Day of Older Persons, a proposal by the United Nations (UN) that was born with the aim of giving visibility and promoting public policies focused on older people, which value the right of older people to be actively involved in society, to exercise their autonomy in making decisions in all areas that affect their life, health, housing, social relations, leisure, culture, etc. In short, the right to live a dignified old age.
This October 1, 2022, the campaign, with a gender focus and perspective, has been dedicated to older women, who usually assume the tasks of care and carry the weight of families, in many cultures, silently and unrecognized.
The UN's motto for this International Day of Older Persons 2022 has been 'The resilience and contribution of older women'. This is a public recognition of the contributions of older women, so often invisible, a call to listen to everything they have to say, to value their perspective, and to put them and the work they do at the focus of international policies and the development of society.
Just about dignity at the end of life was also the Non-Law Proposal (PNL) that, from the Sí Podemos Canarias Group, we defended in the last plenary session of Parliament, on September 28, and which was approved with the votes of the four groups of the 'Pact of the Flowers' plus that of the Ciudadanos deputy. A PNL that deals with rights that have been expanding in recent decades, overcoming prejudices and discrimination, thus improving the lives of many people in the desire that all lives are lives worthy of being lived.
And like the face and cross of a coin, we understand that talking about life also necessarily implies talking about death, that there is no dignified life if the end of life is not.
We are talking about the need to make the current legislation in this matter well known, to implement public policies that develop and facilitate access to Advance Statements of Will (ASW), a valuable tool that guarantees the principle of autonomy of patients to make decisions in health matters with respect to the end of life.
Public policies that guarantee the right to relief from suffering both in reversible and irreversible diseases or situations, through palliative care or the right to euthanasia. In any case, it is about respecting the decisions made, in full mental faculties, about the end of life, as well as the right to a dignified death.
For all this, and to guarantee rights at the end of life, we also proposed in this PNL the creation for the Canary Islands of an Observatory of Dignified Death, a multidisciplinary technical body whose objectives include investigating and supervising, from an integral point of view and with a gender perspective, the quality of death in our territory, both in the municipal, island and autonomous areas. The one in the Canary Islands would be the fourth observatory of the State of this type, after Catalonia, Navarra and Asturias.
Observatories of dignified death that, had they existed in other territories, perhaps would have helped to avoid or better understand the reasons why so many thousands of elderly people in residences were left to die during the pandemic, without giving them the slightest attention, something that their families and civil society, committed to Human Rights, will hardly forget, and who are still waiting for responsibilities to be clarified in the face of the cruelty and contempt with which certain decisions were made, some incomprehensible, such as those taken in the Community of Madrid.
That is why the abstentions of the right-wing parties, Grupo Popular and Coalición Canaria –plus the vote of deputy Vidina Espino- are also difficult to understand, who, with flimsy excuses and without making a single amendment, decided not to support this proposal.
Their votes were not necessary for the proposal to go ahead and the measures contemplated to be implemented, but it portrays their lack of empathy in the face of such a sensitive moment as the end of life, both for those who experience it firsthand and for their relatives and loved ones.
We do not understand well the reason for such a closed and biased position to the extreme right, we can say little to those who ask us, only that if there had been the slightest interest in reaching an agreement on our part there would have been no problem, some amendment could have been negotiated or a separate vote could have been taken on some point.
They didn't even try, that is the disposition and attitude of some members of Parliament in the Canary Islands, who will be known by their votes, they are more about ignoring rights than expanding or defending them, guaranteeing rights to a "dignified life and death" for all is not among their priorities or an interesting topic for debate, as long as it remains a privilege reserved for a minority.
We have no choice but to continue working and forging alliances with those of us who want more democracy and social justice.
Less rights and more rights!
