Free At Last
But no one is thanking God for it. Finally, the long battle to acknowledge death's grip is over, for Eluana Englaro, the young Italian woman who has been in a comatose state for seventeen long years, after suffering massive injuries in a road accident. Her tormented father has been attempting, fruitlessly, to have authorities agree to removing her from life support.One roadblock after another has been put in the way of ending the absurd tragedy of prolonging what no longer exists; life in any practical, meaningful way. The young woman's neurologist was satisfied that he was acting morally, professionally, humanely, when he attempted to assist in her removal from life support. "I am helping a person achieve her own wish, a defenceless person who was betrayed by everyone except her father and a few other people.
She became a political football, a moral, religious metaphor for inhumane treatment. Euthanasia is illegal in Italy, but this was not an instance of euthanasia. The woman was, for all intents and purposes, on the knife-edge of death, functionally incapable of breathing on her own, of mustering any manner of physical or mental initiatives to prolong her life on her own. She had become the proverbial human 'vegetable'.
And in Roman Catholic Italy, orthodoxy demanded that she be maintained, forever, in that condition of hovering between life and death. The public was evenly divided in its opinion over whether she be permitted to die, as her family wished, as she had herself once declared to her family, or to be forcibly maintained on life support. Doctors in her final place of care, had taken steps to stop feeding her.
And then the country's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi stepped in and further politicized the sad affair by refusing to give authority to release her to death. Italy's Senate had begun a debate on emergency legislation whose purpose was to keep this unfortunate young woman on life support, despite an earlier ruling by a provincial court that she could be removed from life support.
News of her death reached the legislators just as they were to begin the debate. Mr. Berlusconi, on hearing of Ms. Englaro's death, piously declared that it was "with deep pain" that he accepted news of her death. Her the release from her imprisonment between her ephemeral life and welcoming death. It was "with deep pain" that he accepted news of her death.
"The bitterness is great that the government could not act to save a life", he said. Bitter, actually, is how her family felt, at their futile attempts to rescue her from living death. And exactly what life was it that the government sought to save? There was no life left in that poor wasted body, that unaware and long-since-fled consciousness.
Tellingly, Italy's President, Giorgio Napolitano had refused his signature on a new law which would have prevented doctors from withholding food from the dying woman causing her to continue involuntarily, unknowingly, to remain in the clutches of the medical equipment that prolonged her state of living death, through a new euthanasia law.
And the Vatican, not to be undone, declared its condemnation of the affair, seeking God's "forgiveness" for those responsible for permitting her to die.
Labels: Religion, Social-Cultural Deviations
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, February 10, 2009
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