ROME — A 38-year-old woman who was at the center of a fierce right-to-die debate that convulsed Italy and dragged in the Vatican died Monday just as lawmakers in Parliament rushed to pass a bill designed to keep her alive.
Eluana Englaro had been in a vegetative state since she was in a car accident 17 years ago. She died Monday night at the Udine clinic where she had been for the past week, said her attorney, Vittorio Angiolini.
“Yes, she has left us,” the ANSA news agency quoted her father, Beppino Englaro, as saying. “But I don’t want to say anything, I just want to be alone.”
Englaro’s doctors had said her condition was irreversible. Late last year, her father won a decade-long court battle to allow her feeding tube to be removed, saying that was her wish. In line with the high court’s ruling, medical workers on Friday began suspending her food and water.
But Italy’s center-right government, backed by the Vatican, had pressed to keep her alive, racing against time to pass legislation prohibiting food and water from being suspended for patients who depend on them.
Senators who had just begun debating the bill observed a minute of silence Monday night when the news of her death was read out in the Senate chamber.
Government officials vowed to pass the legislation even though it was too late to save Englaro.
Even if the bill had been passed in time, it wasn’t clear that it would have kept Englaro alive. Alessandro Pace, constitutional law professor at Rome University, said the law couldn’t have been applied to Englaro because of previous court rulings allowing her feeding tube to be removed.
