There is a BBC report with this title: ”Euthanasia in Europe: A Continent Divided” – accessible here. (And, yes, so that this is clear, the report comes from 2009.) Following is the section from this report on the situation in Italy:
ITALYEuthanasia is illegal, but Italian law upholds a patient’s right to refuse care and the potential contradiction has resulted in several cases which have divided Italians.
The debate is especially passionate in Italy, where the Roman Catholic Church, which is deeply opposed to euthanasia, still holds great sway.
In 2006, Piergiorgio Welby – a terminally-ill man with a severe form of muscular dystrophy – died after a protracted legal dispute during which he described his life as torture.
A judge had ruled that he did not have the right to have his respirator removed, and when anaesthetist Mario Riccio switched off his life support he was investigated by a judge for “consensual homicide”. He was eventually cleared and the judges involved called on politicians to change the law.
In July 2007 came the case of Giovanni Nuvoli, a 53-year-old former football referee with advanced muscular dystrophy, who died after going on hunger strike because he was not allowed his request to die without suffering.
Police prevented his doctor, Tommaso Ciacca, from switching off his respirator. Former Health Minister Livia Turco said at the time that it was time Italy had a law “which allows sick people to express their will”.
Then in July 2008, a court in Milan awarded the father of Eluana Englaro, a 38-year-old woman who has been in a permanent vegetative state since a car crash in 1992, the right to disconnect her feeding tubes.
The judges ruled that doctors had proved Ms Englaro’s coma was irreversible. They also accepted that, before the accident, she had expressed a preference for dying over being kept alive artificially.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi tried to intervene after doctors at a private geriatric clinic began to withhold her food, issuing an emergency decree barring doctors halting nutrition to patients in a coma.
However, President Giorgio Napolitano refused to sign it, and three days later, before the Senate could enact a new law barring doctors halting nutrition to patients in a coma, Ms Englaro died.
Following her death, senators agreed to expedite work on a draft law to clarify end-of-life issues.
“There’s a will to urgently agree on end-of-life legislation,” Health Minister Maurizio Sacconi said.
Apparently, the end-of-life legislation now being considered by the Italian government would prohibit any patient decision at all regarding the end of life, including refusal of treatment, nutrition or hydration. Right to Die Europe has made the following statement (15 March 2011):
The law under discussion by the Italian parliament gives rise to great concern among the societies of Right to Die Europe (RtDE) for its disregard of human dignity at the end of life.
It appears that this law would mean that there would be no possibility for people to ask for an end to meaningless medical treatment or for them to refuse medication, food and water when they are terminally ill.
This crucial end of life decision would be taken by a doctor even when a vulnerable patient with a living will, who has fully considered their position, wished to end their life.
It is incredible that a religion that preaches love and compassion has such an inhuman point of view regarding end of life decisions.
The board of Right to Die Europe, and all the member societies support the general principle that in a civilized society human rights should always take precedence.
Fortunately, for as long as there have been patients and doctors, compassionate doctors all over the world have helped the vulnerable patients in their care to die if they have explicitly made this request.
–Aycke Smook (President, Right to Die Europe)
The source of the proposed law in the Roman Catholic death cult is clear, and needs no further comment. Yet this is the organisation that presumes to dictate morality for the rest of us! And Berlinerblau and Hoffman, Baggini and Stangroom, Kazaz and Mooney et. co, think that it is inappropriate for nonbelievers to treat such organisations and their leaders with disrespect. They deserve our contempt, and that is all they will get from me.
However, part of the statement is seriously in error. The statement reads: “It is incredible that a religion that preaches love and compassion has such an inhuman point of view regarding end of life decisions.” The Roman Catholic Church does not preach love and compassion. It preaches the absolute and inviolable moral law as revealed to the church and discernible (they claim) by human reason (but this last is an old scholastic trick). This law is unbending, and has nothing whatever to do with love or compassion. This has been made brutally clear in a number of recent cases. It needs no further argument. Some, like Karen Armstrong, claim that the heart of religion is kind. It is not. The heart of religion is worldly wealth and power. This is not to say that there are no humanly good and compassionate people who are also religious, but it has nothing intrinsically to do with religion. Religion itself is a poison.
I agree that religion is a poison. However, belief in God and being a spiritual person is not. Having cared for my mother as she died of cancer (and leaving the choice up to her as to when to die – which I won’t go into here) as well as caring for a friend right now who is in end stage lung cancer (who I gave the same option and information, and, when the time comes, who knows?), I have no sense of guilt or shame about what a person chooses to do with their last days. God is in your own conscience – if it, truly, doesn’t feel ‘wrong’, don’t do it…and I don’t believe God wants any of us to die in agony, waiting for the so-called blessing of being allowed to die at last.
I left the Roman Catholic church when I was a teenager because even at that age, I could see that it was a religious pyramid scheme, of sorts. I was even told, when I was twelve, that I shouldn’t ever read the Bible or any other religious literature because the average person has no idea on how to interpret it… By the age of 14, I dug in my heels and refused to even pretend to buy the snake oil.
What is the answer? Like everyone, damned if I know. I do know, however, that we are spiritual creatures who are on an eternal journey. Perhaps its our collective Self who is God – that seems more viable than a vicious, angry and destructive deity who delights in smiting people left, right and willy-nilly.
This was a great post, though. Its thought-provoking, and you didn’t do the usual railing against Christians that is becoming so very tiresome today. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
Thank you “dlday” for your kind words. Of course, it is true that there is no reason we can’t go on using the words ‘god’ and ‘spirituality’ to account for our experience. Neither of them seem particularly helpful to me, though spirituality is often used in a general way to describe what you might call the feeling or emotional dimension of human life.
I find this use of language misleading, because it suggests something I think is probably false, and that is that there is a spiritual dimension to reality, or an independent spiritual reality, and this leads on inevitably to all kinds of speculation about gods, spirits, ghosts, and other aspects of this metaphysical realm. There is no evidence for any of it, I’m afraid, and speculating about it has a propensity to lead people right back into religion, because claims to knowledge have a very natural tendency to organise themselves socially, and beliefs about gods and spirits, arranged socially, just are religions. And this unfortunately simply introduces the poison in another form. Religions are born and die frequently. Only the biggest and the “baddest” survive. A good book on this is Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.
God is love. Perfect love. That’s what makes Him holy, i.e., set apart — His perfectly self-giving, self-sacrificing love. His love, and therefore our love (he calls us to be holy as he is holy), exhibits four characteristics. Authentic love is always free, total, faithful and fruitful. If any one of these characteristics is missing, the love is not love, but selfishness, or lust.
The Roman Catholic Church is the best teacher of God’s love that I have encountered.
There’s no kindness in religion. I have encountered kindness in religious people — though not as often as one might hope.
I volunteer in a program for the terminally ill. Some of the dying are religious. Many are sort-of-believers and others are non-believers.
I’ve seen that many people become LESS interested in religion as they near death. It’s nothing like a scientific study, but my observation is that often doubt grows or enters for the first time in the final weeks or days. To some this is an unwelcome development, but not to all. No one needs the “solace” of religion to face death with both stoicism and serenity.
Well, you and I disagree, Walt, totally, completely and without exception. The Roman Catholic Church is authoritarian and without scruple. It cares nothing for its people, but has great concern about its image. It has permitted its clergy to abuse children, and then to go on and abuse them again and again. It is prepared to let women die rather than to permit an abortion. It will even hold small children to ransom for the foetuses planted in them by abusive men. It scruples not at all to allow people to die in intolerable misery and suffering. If this is love, I’d much rather hate, which is the opposite of love.
Berlusconi is *such* a paragon of virtue, isn’t he? Apparently, underage hookers are OK, but minding his own business re other adults’ medical decisions isn’t.
Eric,
Have you seen the documentary made by Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa? There is a link to it here in three parts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQ0i3nCx60
It’s a remarkably chilling piece, and a subtle reminder of just how religion is a political force, and not a moral force.
What’s shocking is that this is about people choosing to refuse treatment, so-called “passive” euthanasia.
It’s not even about “active” euthanasia.
Yes, Indicating even more strongly that the RCC is absolutely set against any individual exerting control over his/her life, in any aspect. This is inhumane, to say nothing of immoral, despicable, heinous … any other ‘strident’ adjective you may favor.
No doubt ‘Walt’ will disagree.
I’d call it morally reprehensible.
Thank you Egbert, I do know of Hitchens’ stuff on M Theresa. In fact, I have the three part series on a hard drive somewhere. What is shocking about the Italian government’s proposed law is that it is so obviously an obedient submission of state to church. No one today could have dreamed up such a restrictive practice regarding end of life decision making without the church playing from a strong hand. It’s downright obscene. Common law jurisdictions now recognise the right of patients to refuse treatment, food, water, etc. at any time. To suggest that these decisions are to be made by doctors is really trying to turn the clock back to the way things were in the very early parts of the 20th century. The church is like a whale out of water. It has not idea what morality is, but it knows the rules, and keeps floundering around trying to impose its will on anyone who will respond to it with polite obeisance.
So this is what ‘dignity’ means to the rc church: its removal!
Reminds me of something I just read over at B&W:
The Humpty Dumpty argument from Through the Looking Glass:
God is imaginary. Perfectly imaginary. And therefore opens the door for claims about his attributes that are completely and utterly without benefit of evidence.
If god is perfect love, why does he not heal every person who visits Lourdes? Last I checked, some 20 million pilgrims had gone there for healing, yet the church recognizes a mere 12 miracle cures. Why would a perfect loving god have a poorer track record than spontaneous remission rates as recorded in the medical literature?
Start asking yourself the hard questions about god’s “love”, and you’ll see that there is no such thing. Because the creature in question does not exist.