“You’ve asked me for this many times, more times than necessary, but I was confident the euthanasia [bill] would be approved. . . .  So, you’re insisting you want to commit suicide?” Ángel Hernández asked his wife, María José Carrasco, in an April 2019 video widely watched in Spain. “The sooner the better,” she replied.

It was one of their last conversations. Soon after, Hernández helped his wife, who had advanced multiple sclerosis, drink a lethal dose of sodium pentobarbital. He then turned himself in to the police in Madrid. After spending a night in custody, he was released to await trial for homicide.

Hernández’s story was splashed across newspaper and magazine covers across Spain, pushing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide to the center of the political debate weeks before a national election. The Left seized the moment. After Carrasco’s death, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) pledged to make euthanasia legal if his party won a majority; and voters delivered him the mandate he needed.