Video plea by Valentina Maureira

On Sunday, 22 February 2015, Valentina Maureira Riquelme, a Chilean teenager known as Valentina Maureira, self-recorded a short video with her smartphone. In the video, Valentina’s long hair covers most of her orange top, but not her shoulders and upper arms, which look emaciated; her nasal cannula and the machines visible on the background indicate she is speaking from a hospital bed, which has linen with a sea-animal motif. Valentina directly addresses us through the camera and says only three sentences in the recording: ‘My name is Valentina Maureira, I am 14 years old, and I suffer from cystic fibrosis. I request to speak urgently to the president because I’m tired of living with this illness, and she can authorize the injection that will allow me to sleep forever. My older brother, Mike, already died of the same disease’ (translated from the Spanish, as all other quotes). Without the knowledge of her family, Valentina uploaded the video to her Facebook page, from where it was copied into YouTube, quickly going viral. She had been admitted to the Clinical Hospital of the Catholic University in Santiago on 30 January 2015, due to severe malnutrition and respiratory complications resulting from cystic fibrosis – a genetic disorder that has no known cure and affects the lungs and the digestive system. In the case of Valentina, who was diagnosed when she was 6 months old, besides difficulty to breathe, the illness caused vomiting and constant headaches. Valentina remained hospitalized at the same facility through February 2015, when she recorded her video, and up until her passing, on 14 May 2015. Between February and May, her plea reached the president, was shared around the world, and prompted the Chilean civil society and parliament to debate the right to die. While the original post is no longer accessible, many copies of the video remain online, including on the YouTube account of Valentina’s father, Fredy Maureira Godoy, known as Fredy Maureira, an advocate for organ donation and self-determination who became involved in efforts to legalize euthanasia in Chile.

Though extraordinary in content, Valentina’s video has a framing typical of a cell-phone self-recording: a high-angled and slightly tilted medium-closeup, in portrait orientation (which would become associated with TikTok). This intimate framing of a selfie, together with the short runtime – only 24 seconds – makes the format match the controversial content in its viral capacity. The floodlit hospital setting and the reported fact that Valentina recorded the video alone lend authenticity to the message, helping to dismiss hesitations social-media users might have before resharing the video. Valentina’s father told BBC Mundo he had an old flip phone, so he only realized Valentina had posted a video when journalists and politicians started to call him for comment; Fredy emphasized he respected his daughter’s wishes, because ‘she knows this disease better than anyone’. The reach of Valentina’s plea grew exponentially: by February 26, it was being amplified by the Chilean press and picked up by other Latin-American news sources, including the Paraguayan Telefuturo, the Mexican Sopitas, and the Argentinian Diario de Cuyo. Still on the 26th, the Chilean government reacted to the video, with presidential spokesperson Álvaro Elizalde declaring ‘it’s impossible not to be deeply moved’, because ‘we’re talking about a minor who has made a heartbreaking request’, even if ‘current Chilean law doesn’t allow the government to grant a request of this nature’. Elizalde confirmed that the Ministry of Health would provide Valentina and her family ‘with all the psychological and emotional support, as well as any medical treatment needed to improve her quality of life’. By February 27, the international anglophone press was covering the story. On the 28th, President Michelle Bachelet, who trained as a paediatrician, delayed a scheduled public appearance to see Valentina in an unannounced visit. Accompanied by Health Minister Carmen Castillo, the president talked to Valentina for 70 min, and photos of their meeting were widely shared. El Confidencial reported that Valentina asked the president to collaborate on a book and a film about her life, and Bachelet gifted her a recorder to document ideas for those projects. According to BBC Mundo, Valentina was surprised by the thousands of ‘likes’ her video received, which pleased her – as she added – ‘because it motivates people’. The vertiginous transformation of Valentina’s post into a public forum would, in 2021, be echoed by a Twitter thread of Florencia Salgueiro, which catalysed Uruguay’s euthanasia reform (see related Assisted Lab entry).

One month after posting her video, Valentina told El Mercurio that ‘there are people who have led me to change my way of thinking’. This triggered another news cycle, with headlines such as ‘The Chilean girl who requested euthanasia is now reconsidering her decision’ (Clarín) and ‘The teenager who asked Michelle Bachelet for euthanasia wants to live’ (El Confidencial). Fredy Maureira explained that his daughter was moved by a visit from Maribel Oviedo and her father Ernesto, from Argentina: Maribel, who had received a lung transplant and was living with cystic fibrosis into her 20s, gave Valentina hope. This new round of reporting revealed that Valentina’s plea for euthanasia had been inspired by 29-year-old Brittany Maynard, who had shared a viral video in 2014 to communicate her decision to seek an assisted suicide if medical care failed to prevent her suffering from a terminal brain cancer (see related Assisted Lab entry). As soon as Valentina’s change of mind was divulged, interest groups for and against euthanasia accused each other of manipulating her story for their own purposes. The US-based anti-euthanasia group National Right to Life cited Valentina’s supposed about-face as evidence of successful persuasion to live, in spite of the alleged influence of Maynard’s video. Christianity Today included Valentina’s story as a sermon illustration against suicide, and the Catholic news agency ACIPrensa accused ‘some parliamentarians like Guido Girardi of [having] sought to take Valentina’s story to once again propose a euthanasia law in Chile’. Indeed, even though Girardi had spearheaded failed efforts to decriminalize euthanasia in the early 2000s, only after Valentina’s shared her video did the movement for the right to die gain traction. One such bill, promoted by the Boric left-wing government, cleared the House of Representatives in 2021 and was approved by the Senate Health Committee in 2025 — and the parliamentary proceedings include multiple citations of Valentina’s case. However, this legislative effort stalled when Kast began his right-wing presidency in 2026, promising to veto the law. Even if passed, the bill would not have granted someone like Valentina the right to die, since she was not an adult at the time of her plea and her condition may not have been considered acutely terminal, as the proposed law requires. Chile’s 2012 law no. 20.584 gives patients the right to refuse medical treatment, but the 1874 Chilean penal code still implicitly classifies euthanasia as homicide (article 391) and explicitly criminalizes assisted suicide (article 393).