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Italian Court Backs Removing Of Feeding Tube

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The Associated Press

Published: November 14, 2008

ROME - Italy's highest court ruled Thursday in favor of a man's request to disconnect his daughter's feeding tube and allow her to die after 16 years in a vegetative state.

Courts, politicians and the Vatican have weighed in on the fate of Eluana Englaro, who fell into a vegetative state following a car accident in 1992, when she was 20.

The Court of Cassation said it had rejected an appeal by prosecutors against a lower court ruling in July in favor of Beppino Englaro. The father had said his daughter visited a friend in a coma shortly before her accident and expressed the will to refuse treatment in the same situation.

Italy does not allow euthanasia using methods such as fatal doses of drugs. Patients have a right to refuse treatment, but no law allows them to have a living will in case they become unconscious.

Beppino Englaro had fought a decade-long court battle to disconnect his daughter's feeding tube.

The decision "confirms that we live under the rule of law," he was quoted as saying by the ANSA news agency.

Catholic and anti-euthanasia groups had protested the ruling by the lower court in Milan in front of the city's Duomo.

Conservative politicians reacted angrily to Thursday's ruling, saying that the courts had overstepped their bounds. Enrico La Loggia, a lawmaker in Premier Silvio Berlusconi's party, likened the decision to a "death sentence."

The Vatican's top health official, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, said that disconnecting a feeding tube amounts to "killing a person."

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