Women in Italian right-to-die case dead

Reuters

TO SLEEP: Eluana Englaro, who has been in a coma for 16 years and was at the centre of an Italian right-to-die case, has died.

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Eluana Englaro, the 38-year-old comatose woman at the center of an Italian right-to-die case, has died  despite efforts by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to order doctors to feed her.

She had been in a coma since a 1992 car crash.

A moment of silence was observed in the Senate, which was debating a law that would have forced the clinic in northern Italy where she was hospitalized to resume feeding her through a tube after nutrition was stopped at the request of the family.

The silence quickly turned to shouting and finger pointing as center-left and center-right politicians accused each other of trying to make political capital from the case that has riveted Italy for months and raised the ire of the Vatican.

Englaro was called "Italy's Terri Schiavo," the American woman in a vegetative state who was allowed to die in 2005 after a long legal fight.

Her father battled his way through Italy's courts for 10 years to have her feeding tube disconnected, saying it was her wish not to be kept alive artificially.

Berlusconi issued an emergency decree of Friday ordering doctors to resume feeding the woman but it was rejected as unconstitutional by President Giorgio Napolitano.

The case has divided the mainly Catholic country, with daily demonstrations and sit-ins by those who favor letting her die and those who say it is tantamount to murder.

It has led to a constitutional crisis pitting Berlusconi against the head of state and provoked a debate about whether the Vatican, by siding openly with Berlusconi, was unduly interfering.

For the third day in succession, Pope Benedict indirectly referred to the case, telling the new Brazilian ambassador to the Vatican that "the sanctity of life must be safeguarded from conception to its natural end."

When Eluana died, Berlusconi was trying to push through parliament, where he has a large majority, a law that would ban withdrawing food from unconscious patients. The Senate looks set to pass the law Tuesday, while the lower house should vote the next day.

- Reuters