I'd like to post an article about the Italian case, which brought a big debate and was big news here as well.
I find it scandalous, the way
Berlusconi dealt with it.
Italian coma woman’s death ends Berlusconi’s bid to keep her alive
Senators thwarted in bid to fast-track law to replace force-feeding tubes
Eluana Englaro, the 38-year-old Italian woman who spent 17 years in a permanent vegetative state, died shortly after 8pm last night in a clinic in the city of Udine, frustrating the efforts of Silvio Berlusconi to pass a law that would have kept her alive.
Eluana suffered disastrous brain damage in a car crash in 1992. Her father, Beppino, fought a bitterbattle to have what he said were his daughter’s wishes, not to endure a living death, respected. His voice wracked with emotion, he said last night: “I’ve done everything alone, I’ve brought it to this level alone, and I want to finish alone. I don’t want to talk to anyone. The only thing I ask ofmy true friends is not to come looking for me.” The news exploded in the Senate in Rome, which was in the process of debating a hurriedly cobbled-together law that would have made the termination of Eluana’s force-feeding illegal.
Senators stood for a minute’s silence in her memory, but the pious mood was shattered when a member of the ruling People of Liberty party, Gaetano Quagliariello, shouted: “Eluana is not dead, she’s been murdered!”
The session was suspended amid noisy protests. When senators returned, the Senate leader of the centre- left Democratic Party, Anna Finocchiaro, declared angrily, “The umpteenth act of political outrage on the body of Eluana is under way.”
The Englaro family’s long agony – Beppino’s wife is gravely ill with cancer – appeared to be at an end last November when Italy’s highest court approved the removal of the feeding tubes that have kept Eluana alive all these years.
But those who hoped the torment would soon be over reckoned without the determination of the Vatican’s ultra-conservative hierarchy and their political allies to prevent Italy taking what they regarded as the first step in the direction of legalised euthanasia.
A new campaign was mounted to thwart Beppino Englaro’s intentions by threatening clinics which agreed to supervise the final stages of Eluana’s treatment and the replacement of food with sedatives. La Quiete, a clinic in the north-eastern city of Udine, finally agreed to host the patient, and the final act began four days ago when an ambulance braved violent protests by pro-life activists to bear her to the clinic.
But with Eluana only days away from death, the pace of the drama suddenly accelerated. Mr Berlusconi, despite showing scant interest in the issue before, demanded that the President, Giorgio Napolitano, sign a “decree law”, a sort of emergency diktat making it illegal for the feeding tubes to be removed.
MrNapolitano refused, arguing that the “emergency” was nothing of the sort. Refusing to take no for an answer, Mr Berlusconi vowed that he would push a new law through parliament which would make the cessation of force-feeding illegal in any circumstances.
The tragic drama of an unlucky family was thus transformed into what Mr Berlusconi’s critics charged was a highly opportunistic assault on Italy’s post-war Constitution, threatening to smash the carefully delimited division of powers and hugely expand the prerogatives of the Prime Minister.
The proposed law split parliament along non-partisan lines, with the senior statesman and former prime minister Giulio Andreotti, a devout Catholic, inveighing against state intrusion into the private decisions of families. Last night Demetrio Neri, a member of the National Conference on Medical Ethics, said Mr Berlusconi’s proposed law “would remove the liberty of all to decide when treatment should be suspended, and make living wills” – still illegal in Italy – “impossible.”
Commenting on Eluana’s death, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barrigan, the Vatican’s minister of health, said: “May God forgive those who have done this.”
Eluana’s tale: The right to die
18 January 1992: Eluana Englaro is seriously injured in a car crash and lapses into a coma.
1999: Her father, Beppino, insists it was his daughter’s wish to be allowed to die and takes his fight to the courts. Denied by the Court of Appeal.
April 2005: Supreme Court rules against Mr Englaro’s right-to-die appeal.
16 October 2007: The same court grants a retrial.
July 2008: Milan court rules that Ms Englaro’s coma is medically irreversible, and accepts she stated a preference for dying over being kept alive artificially.
November 2008: The Court of Cassation allows removal of feeding tubes, overruling the health ministry.
3 February 2009: Ms Englaro transferred to private facility in Udine where feeding tubes are removed.
9 February 2009: Eluana dies as politicians in Italian Senate debate her right to do so.
