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Italian officials vow to clarify right-to-die law
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-02-10 21:58

ROME -- Italian politicians vowed Tuesday to quickly pass legislation clarifying the right to die after a fierce legal battle over a woman in a vegetative state who died after her family cut off her food and water.

This file photo is a reproduction of an undated photo of Eluana Englaro, released by the Englaro family. Italian senators raced Monday, Feb. 9, 2009 to discuss a bill designed to keep Englaro, hosted in a clinic in Udine, northern Italy, from having her feeding tube disconnected, the latest twist in a right-to-die case that has consumed Italy. Englaro, 38, has been in a vegetative state since she was in a car accident 17 years ago. [Agencies] 

Italy does not allow euthanasia. Patients have a right to refuse treatment, but there is no law that allows them to give advance directions on their treatment if became incapacitated.

Eluana Englaro, 38, fell into what her doctors called an irreversible vegetative state after a 1992 car accident. Her father won a decade-long court battle to allow her feeding tube to be removed, saying she had visited a comatose friend in a hospital before her own accident and said she would never want to be kept alive that way.

Doctors cut off Englaro's food and water Friday. Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government, backed by the Vatican, put an emergency bill before parliament prohibiting food and water from being suspended for patients who depend on them.

Englaro died at her clinic in northern Italy Monday night as the Senate was discussing the bill. An autopsy has not been performed but news reports citing records from the clinic said she died of cardiac arrest.

Senators said they would drop the bill meant to save her and draft more thorough legislation.

"There's a will to urgently agree on end-of-life legislation," Health Minister Maurizio Sacconi said late Monday.

Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, who heads the powerful Italian bishops' conference, said Tuesday that "a just law is necessary for the good of our society and our civilization."

Pope Benedict XVI spoke out several times about the dignity of human life, though he did not cite Englaro directly.

Proponents on both sides of the debate staged daily demonstrations outside the Udine clinic in northeast Italy. Upon news of Englaro's death, the Senate observed a minute of silence. But immediately afterward, center-right senators started shouting "Assassins!"

"She didn't die. She was killed," said Gaetano Quagliarello, a conservative senator.

The Englaro case has drawn comparisons with that of Terri Schiavo, the American woman who died in 2005 after a similarly heated debate.

Congress passed a bill to allow a federal court to review Schiavo's case and then-President George W. Bush returned from his Texas ranch to sign it into law. A federal judge refused to order her feeding tube reinserted, a decision upheld by a federal appeals court and the Supreme Court.