On
July 9, a civil appeals court in Milan
authorised the suspension of the life support system of a 35-year-old woman who
has been in a coma for the past 16 years. The landmark decision has sparked
heated debate over whether removing Eluana Englaro’s artificial feeding tube
would be considered an act of euthanasia.
Englaro has been in a vegetative
state since a car accident in 1992 when she was 19 years old. The Milan appeals
court made the controversial ruling based on proof that Englaro was in an
irreversible coma, stating its decision was ‘inevitable given the extraordinary
duration of a state of permanent vegetation’, and having established her
‘vision of life, irreconcilable with the total and irreversible loss of her
mental faculties.’
For Englaro’s father, Beppino Englaro, this is the
close of a long legal battle. He has been seeking to have her feeding tube
removed since 1999, arguing that before the accident she had said that she
would not want to be kept alive in a vegetative state. He hailed the court
decision: ‘This is a victory for legal rights, at long last the end of the
worst nightmare that any human being can experience. The judges made a
courageous decision. Now at last we can set Eluana free’, he said.
However, the Vatican
has strongly disapproved of the court ruling. Monsignor Fisichella, head of the
Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, said it was similar to ‘an act of
euthanasia’, while chief of the Bioethics Committee of Rome’s Catholic
University hospital, Adrian Pessina, stressed the ‘gravity of the decision’,
which legitimizes euthanasia: ‘Human consciousness does not define personal
identity but rather simply manifests it.
For this reason, the care of persons in a vegetative state is a duty.’
Eluana’s father, who is also her legal guardian, can
ask doctors to remove his daughter’s feeding tubes immediately or wait until
the 60-day appeal option for the state has expired.
