Rome, Italy, Nov 14, 2008 / 13:18 pm
After a prolonged legal battle, the Supreme Court of Italy has ruled food and hydration can be removed from Eluana Englaro, a 37 year-old woman who has been in a coma since 1992 after a car accident, in a similar case to that of Terri Schiavo, who died after 13 days of agony without food or water.
The Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the Attorney General of Milan, who was appealing a lower court ruling that granted permission to euthanize the woman last July. The request to suspend food and hydration was requested by Eluana’s father, Beppino Englaro.
The director of the Athenian Center for Bioethics of the Catholic University, Adriano Pessina, warned last July that a legal ruling of this type “does not consider the principle of the non-disposableness of human life and of the duty, of all civil society as well, not to legitimize the abandoning of therapeutic care and assistance for those citizens who are incapable of providing it for themselves.”
He told the SIR news agency the ruling gives guardians “true life or death power over the person that has been entrusted to them, contravening the meaning of guardianship itself. It is inconceivable that the best thing for somebody is death, something that never constitutes a good that should be protected.”