Government plans to regulate deaths under sedation

Terminally ill patients in Spain will soon be able to die with dignity under heavy sedation when the government introduces a national "right to die" law next year.

In making the announcement after Friday's Cabinet meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba clarified that the government wasn't planning on drafting a euthanasia law. The proposed bill will allow the families of terminally ill patients and doctors to decide whether to administer drugs that alleviate pain, allowing the person to die in the short term. The entitled the Law of Palliative Care and Dignified Death will be ready by March, Rubalcaba said.

"Everyone has been in this type of situation," he said. "It occurs when you are in the hospital ward and the doctor comes to tell you that a loved one - a mother, a brother or wife - is in a bad way and that their death is imminent. And so what is worse is our fear that they are going to suffer between now and the time they die and we ask the doctor if there is anything he can do."

In a recent survey, 97.3 percent of health professionals asked favored this practice even though heavy sedatives are known to cut short a patient's life.

Andalusia is the only region in Spain which has introduced a measure to regulate the right to die.Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero'sSocialist Partyhad pledged in its 2004 government platform to create a parliamentary commission to draft a euthanasia law but never carried it out.