A woman has asked authorities for permission to kill her 22-year-old son because “nothing can be done” to cure his cerebral palsy.
According to Argentinian news outlet La Nación, Eva Briñócoli is requesting a judge hear her case and allow her to euthanise her son Adrián, even though his condition is not terminal.
“Adrián was born like this, with cerebral palsy and seizures,” the woman said in an interview with Channel 12 of Misiones.
“We went to Buenos Aires, he was in the Garrahan Hospital, they medicated him well, but nothing could be done and there is no hope of improvement, so we asked to end his suffering.”
The 22-year-old lives with his parents in the Candelaria neighbourhood, on the outskirts of Posada and requires his mother’s constant care.
“He can’t be on his own,” she said. “We have to change his diapers, sanitize him, feed him, no one can come home and we can’t take him out either.
Briñócoli also went on to say, if anyone spent a full day with her son, they wouldn’t think poorly of her for wanting to kill him.
“What would I say to someone who tells me that I am a heartless mother who demands death for her son? I would tell him to spend a full day with Adrián.”
Cassy Fiano-Chesser of Live Action notes a similar case, in which a Canadian father killed his daughter because she had cerebral palsy. The father claimed the girl was suffering, though she was known to have been a cheerful, happy girl who loved “sleigh rides, television, games, parties, the circus, and pets.”
Even professionals who worked with the girl contradicted the dire description of her life of “suffering” used to justify her killing.
Fiano-Chesser rightly said these two cases demonstrate the belief that many have in our society, that life with a disability is not worth living.
“It is long past time to abandon the thinking that the disabled and the sick are burdens, and instead embrace a new culture where we are all accepted as the valuable, worthwhile individuals that we already are,” she said.
It’s long been predicted that the push to euthanise the terminally ill would soon devolve into a push to euthanise the inconvenient. What many seemingly didn’t realise was just how quickly we’d get there.