Italy Embroiled in Right-to-Die Uproar

ROME, Feb. 10, 2009— -- Eluana Englaro, a 37-year-old Italian woman who has been in a vegetative state for the last 17 years, died unexpectedly Monday evening in a clinic in Udine while the Italian Senate was still in session debating an emergency bill that was meant to prevent her death.

Doctors had begun suspending food and water for Englaro four days ago.

Eluana Englaro's father, Beppino Englaro, had recently won a decadelong battle through all of Italy's courts for the right to have his daughter's feeding tube removed.

An only child, she went into an irreversible coma after a car accident at age 20. Her father insists she had expressed her desire not to be kept alive artificially.

When Italian government authorities, in particular the health minister, contested the Italian supreme court decision to allow his daughter's feeding tube to be removed, Beppino Englaro took his case to the European Parliament and won.

And yet, the Italian center-right government, with strong pressure from the Catholic Church, would not let it happen and presented the president of Italy with an emergency decree prohibiting the suspension of nourishment and hydration in these cases.

President Giorgio Napolitano did not sign the decree and the government was forced to try to rush a bill through both houses of parliament.

While Italy does not allow euthanasia, patients have the right to refuse treatment. But there is no law allowing people to make a living will and thus establish their wish to receive or refuse treatment if they become incapacitated.

Beppino Englaro was able to provide courts with sufficient evidence that his daughter did not want to be kept alive artificially.

Even if the bill had passed before she died, however, it was not clear whether it would have applied to Eluana Englaro, whose case had already been decided by previous court rulings.

But the debate had already gone way beyond the person of Eluana Englaro -- she had become the symbol of a bitter political battle that divided pretty much along left and right party lines and had little to do with end-of-life issues.