Italian father wins his daughter’s right-to-die
Daylife/Reuters Pictures
Italy’s Supreme Court provoked the fury of conservatives yesterday by ruling that a father can disconnect the feeding tube that has kept his daughter alive in a coma for nearly 17 years.
In one of the most painfully emotive cases this Catholic country has confronted for years, the court overturned the earlier rejection by an appeal court of the father’s right to end his daughter’s life. The ruling was denounced by conservatives as the legalisation of euthanasia in Italy, but by the father, Beppino Englaro, as “a way out of hell”.
Eluana Englaro was still a teenager in 1992 when she was injured in a car crash which put her into a “persistent vegetative state”, from which she has shown no signs of emerging in the subsequent 16 years. Her father has been fighting for nearly 10 years for the right to remove the feeding tubes that keep her alive in her hospital room in the northern Italian town of Lecco. In a first reaction to the court’s ruling last night, he said: “We live in a state of rights. At last there is a way out of this hell.”
The Supreme Court endorsed the original ruling by a court in Milan in July which accepted that Ms Englaro’s coma was irreversible, and that before the car crash she had stated her preference to die rather than be kept alive artificially.
Apart from the courts, does her family have the right and responsibility to make this decision?
