Photo: A hospitalized patient, image from Archive. / Shutterstock
By: EFE
Wednesday, October 30
43-year-old tetraplegic man receives first authorization for assisted suicide in Italy
A quadriplegic of 43 years that takes the last 10 immobilized in bed, is the first patient to have been authorized to undergo medically assisted suicide in Italy , after a Constitutional Court ruling established that right in 2019.
“The Ethics Committee (of the public health service) found that the man is within the conditions established by the Council to access assisted suicide, for the first time in Italy ”, announced the Luca Coscioni Association , who has spent years fighting for the introduction of a law to regulate euthanasia in Italy.
“Mario” -a fictitious name to keep hidden the identify sick ad- had been over a year requesting the hospital in the Marche region (center-east) where he is followed “to verify his health conditions to access, legally in Italy, a lethal drug to put an end to his suffering”, the term provided by the judgment of the Constitutional.
After the first refusal of the regional service of Marche (ASUR), a mediation award and the final decision of the Ancona Court, in addition to two legal warnings to ASUR, Mario finally obtained the favorable opinion of the Ethics Committee, after a group of specialist doctors confirmed that he has the right to legal access to assisted suicide.
“I feel lighter”
“I feel lighter, I have freed myself of all the tension accumulated in recent years”, Mario said when he knew the decision , as collected in a statement by the Coscioni association, which has accompanied him throughout the legal journey necessary to achieve his wish.
Filomena Gallo, Mario’s co-defender and secretary of the organization, was happy about the decision, although she considered “very serious that it took so long”.
Now “we will provide, in collaboration with an expert, the details of the methods of self-administration of the drug suitable for Mario, depending on his conditions. The ruling of the Constitutional Court establishes that the public structure of the National Health Service is only responsible for verifying the modalities before the competent territorial ethics committee ”, he explained.
Public Health “hides behind the absence of a law that defines the procedures” as a result of the “paralysis of Parliament, which three years after the request of the Constitutional Court, is still unable to approve it,” he said. his part Mario Cappato, treasurer of the Association.
Calvary and suffering
“The result of this institutional irresponsibility is that people like Mario are forced to endure even a judicial ordeal, in addition to physical and psychological suffering caused by his condition ”, he added.
Although “it is possible that the decision of the Ethics Committeelet Mario get what he’s been asking for soon 14 months, to have clear rules that go beyond the issue of suicide aid and regulate euthanasia in the broadest sense, the intervention of the Italian people will be necessary , with the referendum that partially decriminalizes the crime of consensual murder. ”
Last month, Gallo and Cappato delivered to the Supreme Court a petition signed by 1.2 millions of people to call for a referendum on euthanasia .
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