Slovenian lawmakers voted on Friday to legalize assisted dying, a right backed by a majority of voters in a referendum.
The vote means the central European country will join several others on the continent which allow terminally ill people to receive medical help to end their lives, including Switzerland and Austria.
Slovenia’s parliament passed the bill with 50 votes in favour, 34 against and three abstentions.
The bill gives lucid, terminally ill patients the right to aid in dying if their suffering is unbearable and all treatment options have been exhausted.
It also allows for assisted dying if treatment offers no reasonable prospect of recovery or improvement of the patient’s condition, but not to end unbearable suffering resulting from mental illness.
It is expected to come into force in the coming weeks.
Tereza Novak, lawmaker of the ruling Freedom Movement, which had supported the bill, said parliament that the “right [to assisted dying] does not represent a defeat for medicine.”
“It would be wrong for medicine to deprive people of their right to die if they want to and medicine cannot help them,” the liberal MP said.
The conservative Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) has denounced the bill, saying it “opens the door to a culture of death, the loss of human dignity and the minimization of the value of life, in particular of the most vulnerable.”
In a referendum last year, 55 per cent of Slovenians voted in favour of assisted suicide.
The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg have decriminalized euthanasia, namely death induced by a caregiver at the request of a patient.
