This week the world was shocked by the tragic story of 25-year-old Noelia Castillo.
On Thursday, the victim of alleged gang rape ended her short life with the help of the government of Spain, where assisted suicide has been legal since 2021.
Oh, how many systems have failed Castillo.
Her death also ended a protracted legal battle mounted by her father and the conservative religious Spanish group Abogados Cristianos (Chrisan Lawyers), who attempted to block her suicide after it was approved back in 2024.
Ultimately, Spain’s Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights backed her bid.
Castillo’s story is downright dystopian. This wasn’t a woman condemned to death by a fatal medical diagnosis. Hers was a messy and dark cluster of mental illness, sexual assault and a botched suicide attempt that essentially led to her being eligible to facilitate her own demise.
But her agonized father objected on the grounds that all of that is exactly what prevented her from being of sound mind to make such a grave decision.
At 21 and following the alleged rape by three young men, Castillo attempted suicide by jumping off the roof of a five-story building. She survived but was left paralyzed from the waist down. Afterward, she was confined to a wheelchair and suffered from chronic pain.
She claimed she had also been sexually assaulted twice before, including by a longterm boyfriend.
“I want to go now and stop suffering, period. None of my family is in favor of euthanasia. But what about all the pain I’ve suffered during all these years?” she said in an interview with the Spanish TV show“Y Ahora Sonsoles.”
Castillo described a hopeless hell on earth, saying she didn’t “feel like doing anything: not going out, not eating. Sleeping is very difficult for me, and I have back and leg pain.”
Most disturbingly, she visualized her funeral the way many young women do their weddings.
“I’ve told them how I want it to be. I want to die looking beautiful. I’ve always thought I want to die looking good,” she said of her death wish. “I’ll wear my prettiest dress and put on makeup; it will be something simple.”
The tragedy of the Castillo family — and it is a family tragedy — will seem so distant to most of us. Happening in a land an ocean away.
However, just to our north, Canada has zealously turned euthanasia into a national industry. June will mark 10 years since their MAID Act (Medican Assistance in Dying) was passed, and it’s projected that more than 100,000 people will have used it to die by the time the law hits the decade mark.
A grim and disgusting milestone.
Ten states, as well as the District of Columbia, allow for “medical aid dying,” and a similar law is coming to the Empire State.
Last month, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation allowing assisted suicide for terminally ill New Yorkers with less than six months to live. It’s set to go into effect in June.
“My mother died of ALS, and I am all too familiar with the pain of seeing someone you love suffer and being powerless to stop it,” Hochul said at the time, adding that the bill will “allow New Yorkers to suffer less — to shorten not their lives, but their deaths.”
Among the state’s guardrails are a five-day waiting period between when the lethal prescription is written and filled; video or audio of the patient’s request; and allowing “religiously-oriented home hospice providers to opt out.
How long until we have a pile up of bodies like in Canada, where 26-year-old Kiano Vafaeian died in December of 2025? Did he have fatal brain cancer? No he suffered from diabetes, vision problems and seasonal depression.
His family rightfully objected to his fatal decision.
“We never thought there would be a chance that any doctor would approve a 22- or 23-year-old at that time for MAID because of diabetes or blindness,” said his mother, Margarat Marsilla.
But such disregard for life is a slippery slope, and these laws open doors for murkier cases like those of Castillo and Vafeaian.
The state should be fixing potholes, keeping their citizens safe, protecting order and maintaining infrastructure.
It shouldn’t be in the business of mercy killings.
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