Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Italian President Pushing Euthanasia Debate
After a 52 year old man with muscular dystrophy wrote a letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano begging for the right to assisted suicide. Now, after a similar request, Napolitano has called for public debate on the subject:
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano has sparked controversy by calling for the European nation's parliament to debate the subject of euthanasia. His calls comes after he received a letter from a terminally ill man who wants the nation to legalize mercy killing so he can be spared from his condition.
Piergiorgio Welby, a 60 year-old man who is afflicted with advanced muscular dystrophy, wrote to Napolitano saying that Italians should have the same access to euthanasia and assisted suicide that residents of Switzerland, Holland and Belgium do.
"When a terminally ill person decides to give up those he loves, his friends and life itself, and asks to be able to end a cruelly biological survival, I believe that will should be respected," Welby wrote, according to the ANSA news agency.
Napolitano said he was "deeply moved" and "touched" by the letter.
The timing of two such similar letters is suspicious. The former case could be resolved by turning off the patient's machine and isn't relevant to the PAS/euthanasia debate at all:
After some years in bed at home, he was taken to hospital. "Giovanni is destined to die" Maddalena said "and simply asks to receive no more medicines. He doesn't want the machine that helps him breath to be stopped, he just want the cures to be ended". The letter he sent to Napolitano and the main national journals says: "I have always loved life, but I am able to accept that life ends, because it is nature. What sense is there in prolonging my life? Is that not against nature? Pope Woijtila understood it, when he asked his doctors to let him die".
As we've seen time and again in Britain, the US, Australia and Canada the right-to-die movement is exploiting human misery to stage its latest PR campaign.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano has sparked controversy by calling for the European nation's parliament to debate the subject of euthanasia. His calls comes after he received a letter from a terminally ill man who wants the nation to legalize mercy killing so he can be spared from his condition.
Piergiorgio Welby, a 60 year-old man who is afflicted with advanced muscular dystrophy, wrote to Napolitano saying that Italians should have the same access to euthanasia and assisted suicide that residents of Switzerland, Holland and Belgium do.
"When a terminally ill person decides to give up those he loves, his friends and life itself, and asks to be able to end a cruelly biological survival, I believe that will should be respected," Welby wrote, according to the ANSA news agency.
Napolitano said he was "deeply moved" and "touched" by the letter.
The timing of two such similar letters is suspicious. The former case could be resolved by turning off the patient's machine and isn't relevant to the PAS/euthanasia debate at all:
After some years in bed at home, he was taken to hospital. "Giovanni is destined to die" Maddalena said "and simply asks to receive no more medicines. He doesn't want the machine that helps him breath to be stopped, he just want the cures to be ended". The letter he sent to Napolitano and the main national journals says: "I have always loved life, but I am able to accept that life ends, because it is nature. What sense is there in prolonging my life? Is that not against nature? Pope Woijtila understood it, when he asked his doctors to let him die".
As we've seen time and again in Britain, the US, Australia and Canada the right-to-die movement is exploiting human misery to stage its latest PR campaign.
papijoe 8:23 AM
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