A Portrait of a Failing Civilization

By Noah Rothman

Friday, March 27, 2026

 

Noelia Castillo Ramos is dead. In the mere 25 years she spent on this earth, nearly everyone in her life except for her immediate family failed her. But it was Ramos’s native Spain and its government that may be primarily responsible for consigning her to the worldly torment that she was so desperate to escape. In the end, the most that Spain could do for Ramos was to kill her.

 

“I want to go now in peace and stop suffering, period,” Ramos recently said in an interview. “None of my family is in favor of euthanasia. But what about all the pain I’ve suffered during all these years?” she asked. “The happiness of a father, a mother, or a sister cannot be more important than the life of a daughter.”

 

Ramos’s psychological distress was certainly real. She described having been repeatedly raped, once by an ex-boyfriend and subsequently by three other men at the same time in 2022. The trauma led her to attempt to take her own life by jumping from a fifth-floor window. She survived the fall, but it left her paraplegic with no hope of regaining the use of her legs.

 

Ramos sought assisted euthanasia despite her family’s objections. Ramos’s father sued to prevent his daughter from leaving him, arguing that his daughter’s longtime mental illness (for which she had received psychiatric treatment from the age of 13, after spending much of her childhood in “care homes”) impaired her judgment. But following a two-year legal battle, Ramos’s lawyers secured verdicts from both Spain’s Constitutional Court and the inaptly named European Court of Human Rights in their client’s favor.

 

Ramos had reason to take her own life and was clear-sighted enough to seek death, the courts determined. Spain obliged her.

 

Horrified observers of this spectacle maintain that the Spanish state seemed more inclined to facilitate Ramos’s murder than to help her.

 

The BBC reports:

 

A former friend of Castillo, Carla Rodríguez, tried to enter the hospital to persuade her to change her mind, but told Spanish media that police had barred her from entering . . . . “The institutions that should have protected Noelia failed her,” wrote [conservative People’s Party] leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo on social media. He added: “I refuse to believe that the state did not have the tools to give her care.”

 

The left-of-center Spanish media outlet, El País, disagrees. In its editorial, the paper blamed Ramos’s parents and friends for adding “nearly two years of pain to her existence” by trying to convince her not to kill herself.

 

Indeed, Ramos’s ordeal is a metaphor for the Spanish state itself. Madrid seems inclined to provide its citizens with the political equivalent of an anesthetic — a comfortable setting in which they can put their civilizational project to a merciful end.

 

El País‘s ally at the head of the Spanish government, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, has attempted to paper over his country’s high unemployment, moribund housing and construction industries, and rising position on the global “Misery Index” by focusing the public on the menace of the contemptible Israelis and their malignant capitalist allies in the United States.

 

Sánchez has positioned himself as one of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s most vocal critics and obdurate opponents. Indeed, the Spanish leader is attempting to turn his country into the epicenter of a new socialist international. “Sánchez is pushing to build a network of left-wing politicians around the world — mirroring the cross-border club that right-wing nationalists have built, from Hungary to Argentina,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week. Not that he’s having much luck. “European leaders excluded him from group chats where they discussed how to handle Trump,” the report added.

 

Still, even if it distracts him from his country’s many domestic challenges, the prime minister spends much of his time issuing bombastic condemnations of Israel and the United States. And it seems his fellow Spaniards are eager for the distraction. As my former colleague Abe Greenwald has often written, anti-Westernism and its close cousin, antisemitism, help losers avoid confronting the conditions that made them losers in the first place. It’s a dreary, self-reinforcing cycle, but it’s also one to which the Spaniards seem committed.

 

Ramos’s fate is analogous to that of the country in which she was unlucky enough to be born. Under a leftist government, Spain has no higher ambitions than to become a critic of Western civilization and its priorities as it settles into a warm bath from which it will not emerge. Noelia Castillo Ramos’s ordeal was tough to watch. It is no easier to observe a once great civilization consign itself to civilizational suicide.