The State Took Her From Her Family. Then It Decided She Should Die.

Sometimes a news event comes along that is so chillingly horrific that it confirms the presence of the devil in our midst. Thursday’s murder of a young woman by the state through euthanasia certainly qualifies.

This particular case also contains a warning: it is happening in Europe as a result of societal trends that are also gathering speed in America. These include family breakdown, secularization, the growth of the state, and the resulting embrace of a culture of death by the bureaucracy, the media, and the Left.

And this was not a one-off. Noelia Castillo Ramos, in Spain, is the second young woman in less than three years to be euthanized by a European state.

In fact, the two cases are alarmingly similar. Noelia and Milou Verhoof, who was euthanized in the Netherlands in 2023, were both raped as mere girls, understandably fell into depression, and eventually asked the state to help kill themselves. And the state was only too happy to oblige.

The case of Noelia — killed at a hospital near Barcelona — has drawn worldwide attention online, which is itself proof that the desire to cling to life is a basic human instinct.

Noelia suffered a lot in her life. The Spanish government took custody from her parents 12 years ago when she was just 13, after they divorced, fell into hard times, and lost their house. Her father, Gerónimo, drank at the time, according to news reports.

The Catalan regional government, of which Barcelona is the capital, then placed her in a state-supervised youth center. It was there that Noelia was gang-raped by three young men who were reportedly illegal aliens.

Nothing happened to her aggressors, but Noelia was never the same. She plunged into a severe depression, and suffered as well from borderline personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In 2022, Noelia tried to end her life by throwing herself from a fifth-floor window. She survived, but ended up a paraplegic, stuck in a wheelchair and suffering great pain.

She then demanded euthanasia, which Spain’s current government of Socialists and communists legalized in 2021. Noelia’s father opposed it, arguing that her many disorders prevented her from making an informed decision, and pursued the case till the end in the courts.

On Thursday, a Barcelona judge denied a last-minute request to halt the proceedings. Around 6:00 pm, doctors at Hospital Residència Sant Camil in Sant Pere de Ribes, near the Catalan capital, gave her a lethal injection that stopped her breathing and her heart.

Noelia, in other words, was asphyxiated by the same state that took her away from those who loved her — and then either could not or would not protect her.

For the Left, this was a victory. The newspaper El País wrote caustically about the Abogados Cristianos, the Spanish Foundation of Christian Lawyers, which worked with Noelia’s father to stop the euthanasia. In typical lapidary style, the paper wrote:

For a year and a half this organization [Abogados Cristianos] has been behind the father’s legal battle to prevent the assisted death of Noelia, who suffers from paraplegia. … Advised by the ultra-Catholic group Abogados Cristianos, the man has entangled his daughter in a legal maze that has kept her alive, against her will, for 601 days.

For Spain’s main leftist newspaper, this was about “dying with dignity.” The court battle “prolonged the suffering of a young woman who has never wavered in her decision and who has received scientific endorsement from the independent professionals who make up the Catalan Guarantee and Evaluation Commission (CGAC).”

And this has indeed been a battle between those who believe that the state, led by technocrats, has the right to impose its choices on the family, even to make life-and-death decisions, and those who believe in a higher order. Good and evil, some might say.

Bestselling Spanish author Irene Gonzalez, a friend and insightful observer of Spanish life, called it a “state execution.” She wrote on X:

The State separated her from her parents — who loved her — yet failed to protect, shelter, or provide her with psychological or emotional support. She was a vulnerable young woman whom the State left in a state of absolute defenselessness; its solution is simply to get her out of the way. Euthanasia appears to be the execution — the final step in a case involving abduction and torture — carried out with the haste of a system eager to erase the traces of what the “State” is truly doing in the name of a dignified death.

America, look at Europe — and beware.

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Mike Gonzales is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.