Abstract

ALONSO, Juan Pedro  and  CRUZ ESQUIVEL, Juan. Incidence of Religious Values in the Legislation of the Rights of the Dying: Analysis of Parliamentary Bills on the Refusal of Medical Treatments in Argentina. Estud. sociol [online]. 2020, vol.38, n.112, pp.173-200.  Epub May 22, 2020. ISSN 2448-6442.  https://doi.org/10.24201/es.2020v38n112.1738.

The paper examines the influence of religious values -specifically from the Catholic Church- in the legislation of the rights of dying patients to refuse medical treatments by the National Congress of Argentina. Based on the analysis of a corpus of bills introduced in the last decades (from 1996 to 2012), the tensions and articulations between confessional and secular arguments surrounding the attempts to legislate on matters regarding autonomy at the end of life are discussed. The paper describes the confessional sources and arguments found in these initiatives and the use of these values to support divergent positions regarding the rights of terminally ill patients. The important presence and the invocation to religious values respond to a particular configuration of Argentinean secularity and political culture, which reflects the crystallization of complementary spaces between religion and politics.

Keywords : end of life; death with dignity; Catholic Church; Argentina.