Spanish woman, 25, receives euthanasia after landmark legal battle with her father

A Barcelona judge on Thursday denied a last-minute bid to block the assisted death of Noelia Castillo Ramos, a 25-year-old Spanish woman who has been paraplegic since 2022 and had fought for nearly two years to exercise her right to die under Spanish law.

The emergency injunctive measures had been requested by Abogados Cristianos, or Christian Lawyers, the conservative advocacy group representing Ms. Castillo’s father, Geronimo Castillo, who had spent more than a year attempting to legally block his daughter’s assisted death. A court ultimately determined that Ms. Castillo had the “full capacity to decide” whether to end her life through assisted dying.

According to El Pais, Ms. Castillo reported suffering multiple incidents of sexual abuse, saying the last was at the hands of three boys. Shortly thereafter, in October 2022, she jumped from the fifth floor of a building. She survived but was left paralyzed from the waist down and in chronic pain, with a severe and irreversible spinal cord injury causing severe neuropathic pain and incontinence. She formally requested euthanasia in 2024.

Had everything gone according to plan, Ms. Castillo would have died on Aug. 2, 2024, the date her euthanasia had originally been scheduled, after the Catalan Guarantee and Evaluation Commission unanimously approved her request. But a Barcelona court accepted her father’s petition and temporarily halted the procedure, touching off a legal battle that delayed her procedure by 601 days.

The case wound through the courts: Catalonia’s judiciary affirmed her right to euthanasia, then Spain’s Supreme Court and Constitutional Court rejected her father’s challenges, ruling that his opposition could not override her autonomy. In the days before her scheduled procedure, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg also dismissed the father’s request for a precautionary measure, resolving the final legal challenge to Ms. Castillo’s death.

Her father’s legal team argued that Ms. Castillo’s diagnoses, including borderline personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as a history of suicidal ideation, compromised her decision-making capacity. He and the Christian Lawyers Foundation contended that her psychological disorders left her with a disability rating of 67%, rising to 74% after her suicide attempt. The court, however, ruled that her father lacked standing to appeal, given that she was of legal age and not mentally incapacitated.

In her final television interview, broadcast Wednesday on Spanish network Antena 3 from her grandmother’s home, Ms. Castillo spoke candidly about her family’s opposition.

“Let’s see if I can get some rest because I can’t take this family anymore, I can’t take the pain anymore, I can’t take everything that torments me in my head from what I’ve been through,” she said. She also questioned her father’s motives for the legal fight: “He never calls me or writes to me. Why does he want me alive, just to keep me in a hospital?”

Despite disagreeing with her daughter’s decision, Ms. Castillo’s mother, Yolanda, indicated she would be present at the procedure. “If you can come to terms with it, and you want to do it, I’m here with you,” she said in a public statement.

Ms. Castillo’s parents separated when she was 13, leading to a period in the care of the Catalan government. She later said she suffered multiple incidents of sexual abuse before the 2022 assault that left her paraplegic.

Spain legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide in June 2021 for people with incurable or severely debilitating conditions, permitting assisted dying for adults with “chronic or invalidating suffering.” Ms. Castillo’s case is believed to be the first euthanasia case in Spain to go to trial, according to El Pais, marking a significant test of how the country’s five-year-old law applies in cases involving both physical and psychiatric suffering.