Free to live

The bill on so-called “anticipated declarations of treatment” (or “living wills”, according to the definition introduced in the USA in the late 1960s, i.e. a document in which the patient requests to be allowed to die rather than be kept alive by artificial means) was approved in Rome by the Senate of the Republic yesterday evening, 26 March, with 150 votes in favour, 123 against and 3 abstentions. The provision, which will now return for its second reading to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Italian Parliament, contains, inter alia, a ban on the suspension of artificial nutrition and hydration for patients in a vegetative state, considering such measures not therapeutic treatments, but “forms of vital support”; a ban on “disproportionate extraordinary treatment” (or over-zealous treatment); and the establishment of a national register of living wills. According to the legislation approved, the wishes expressed by patients in such declarations will not be binding for the physicians treating them. The validity of living wills is five years.A “more mature conscience” in the civil society. “It is up to civil society to mobilise itself in order to acquire at first hand a more mature conscience of what is at stake in human and cultural terms, so as to avoid in future any conceptual blocks and temptations to delegate to others”, said Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI), in his opening address to the Permanent Council of the CEI (Rome, 23-26 March), while the debate on the “end of life” bill was in progress in Parliament. In this connection, the President of the CEI welcomed the Manifesto “Free to live”, published by three lay organizations – Science & Life, Forum of Family Associations and Retinopera – as an initiative which “deserves to be encouraged and supported by us” and disseminated “in the living fabric of parishes, lay associations, and the world of the media”. A “false solution”. “Any drift towards euthanasia, however technically circumscribed or conceptually sweetened, is in reality a false solution for man today”, declared Cardinal Bagnasco. He underlined that “in modern democracies life needs to be defended because it is indispensable to limit the ‘biopolitical’ power both of science and of the State. And this defence of life is given substance by expressing a firm ‘yes’ to the protection of the human rights of everyone, both those who are economically able to defend themselves and those who cannot do so, and an equally forthright ‘no’ to the death sentence, the trade in human organs, sexual mutilations, alterations to human fertility, and any non-therapeutic manipulation of the human body, even if freely wished by adult, informed and conscientious persons”. Three great “yes” and three great “no”. “Yes to life, yes to palliative medicine, yes to increasing and humanizing assistance to patients and the elderly. No to euthanasia, no to therapeutic over-treatment, no to the abandonment of those who are most vulnerable”. These are the three great affirmations of “yes” and “no” contained in the Manifesto “Free to Live”, signed by the leaders of Italian Catholic lay associations, new ecclesial groups and movements, which “will form the essential point of reference for a major campaign of community discernment within parishes and ecclesial groups throughout the country”. “Man is pro-life. Everything in us impels us towards life, the indispensable condition to love, hope and enjoy freedom – says the document, published on 20 March -. The plight of the suffering and the fear of death cannot obscure this evidence. For those who are ill especially ask not to be abandoned, but to be cared for and cherished with benevolence, to be loved right to the end”. So, “even in dramatic situations, asking to die is always the expression of an extreme need for love; only a partial view can interpret the sufferings of those who are ill or disabled as a rejection of life. Even in the gravest conditions what a person transmits in affective, symbolic and spiritual terms has an extraordinary importance and touches the deepest impulses of the human heart”.Loving life to the end. “The human person – continues the Manifesto – is developed in a dense network of personal relationships”; to sever “this network is an injustice to everyone and a damage for everyone. Theorizing death as ‘right to freedom’ inevitably ends up by injuring the freedom of others and even more so the sense of human community”. “As citizens – says the document – we know that our Constitution defends human rights not as abstract principles, but as the real presupposition of our life, which is at once a life of the physical body and a life of the psyche, private and public. Never as today is civilization measured by the care that, without drawing any distinctions between persons, is reserved for all those who are elderly, ill or unable to look after themselves. It is essential in any case to avoid adding not only to their suffering, but also to their insecurity. We ask that the weakest be effectively helped to live and not to die, to live with dignity, not to die out of false compassion. Only by loving the life of each person right to the end is there hope of a future for everyone”.