The right to die with dignity and conscientious objection

Colombia’s Constitutional Court, at guaranteeing the fundamental right to live and die with dignity, in the liberating expression of human rights, did not forget the mythical image of Charon ferrying the dead in his boat to Hades2. In Colombia, the struggle against death, stubborn and limitless, contrary to the expression of the patients’ will, cannot anymore be accepted as a duty or as a right of the doctors, who now must resign themselves to the conscious and independent decision of their patients, understanding the dimension of existence and of human dignity against the limits of medicine and science, to lead them, just with the necessary palliative care, in crossing the River Styx, to the “world of the dead “. Denying euthanasia, in terms of the decision of the Constitutional Court, constitutes a flagrant violation of the patients’ “life project”, who have, in the established circumstances, the right to legitimate anticipation of death.