Dear Director Feltri,
Tuscany becomes the “Switzerland” of Italy. As was foreseeable, the regional council approved the law on the end of life. What, in different ways, had been blocked in other regions, finds the go -ahead of the left majority in the region led by Piddino Eugenio Giani, who claims that it is “a text that wants to be simply implemented on the administrative level of What the sentence of the Constitutional Court tells us. So the ideological debate on euthanasia has nothing to do with it. ” Doesn’t it have to do with it? Having not managed to make a law in Parliament, the radicals and the left found the (illegitimate) shortcut of the regional councils to introduce the assisted suicide in our country. As usual, the Tuscan left councilors recalled the judgments of the Constitutional Court, thus presenting their law almost as a “due act”, a way to fulfill the requests of the Consulta and an administrative act to give “certain times” to the requests who reach the ASL. But, as the jurists Emanuele Biliotti and Filippo Various explained, this is not a matter on which the regions can intervene, but is the prerogative of the state: “The constitutional jurisprudence does not recognize the patients with any claims immediately payable. With this appears to manifest the constitutional illegitimacy of legislative proposals such as the one under discussion in the Tuscany Regional Assembly for violation of an area of exclusive legislative competence of the State. The same court in the 2019 and 2024 decisions invited Parliament to intervene but did not recognize a regional competence at all. ” Since the radical battle began, in each region we have tried in every way to force the hand so that the radical law proposal was approved. From today also in Italy death on request becomes a question of protocol. As Don Massimo Angelelli, director of the CEI office for the pastoral care of health, has understood well, “if there is a right to death, someone has a duty to get me death. This is not acceptable ». Other than pure administrative act. The left is against regional autonomy, except that which concerns death.
Antonio Cascone
Padua
Dear Antonio,
Maybe we were Switzerland, which on this front, that of which you take in your letter, is much ahead and civil of us. It is not a mystery that I have always been a convinced supporter of a law on euthanasia, a law that I consider necessary for the purpose of regulating a matter where chaos reigns. I also believe that it is not the task of the regions to proceed, but that it is up to the chambers legislating on the subject, an operation for years has been postponed for matters of mere moralism, indeed rotten bigotry. I guarantee you, which absolutely do not hope you, this is clear, that if you were sick to the point of being reduced to a vegetative and not very dignified state in a bed, immobilized, without the possibility of speaking, of eating, drinking, dragging Your days in suffering, in pain, in despair, then you would like it a rule on euthanasia, such as to allow you to find peace, to put an end to useless pain, to an unsustainable agony and Unbearably long, which seems infinite. For me, personal freedom includes to decide, as a terminal patient and without any hope of healing, of turning off gently, without remaining attached to machines, pipes, threads, therapies, which do not relieve the suffering but deceive it and prolong it in a way even cruel. We are then allowed to depart, if we want it. Nobody, unable to try what we try, prevents us, obstacles us, obliges us to martyrdom, claiming to pronounce what is right and what is unfair according to his religious feeling. Moreover, ours is a secular state. These battles are battles of civilizations, indeed of humanity, do not present a political color, they should not be on the right or left. How can it be denying a soul and a body in pain and without escape the way out of an atrocious torment? As you can be as arrogant to say to a human being: «No, you are not allowed to die, you must follow to suffer. Resigned »? Forgive me but I don’t understand it.
And I do not understand above all this: why abortion, that is, the destruction of a life in the womb on the decision of third parties, is legitimate, while the induced death of a sick adult who self -determines and chooses for himself to pass on to In order to interrupt his torment, is a crime, an abomination, something unacceptable, absolutely illegitimate?
When someone has explained to me this, answering this question convincingly, perhaps I will be able to review my position on the end of life, but until then I have always been and the rest of the opinion that cannot be prohibited
to a terminal patient of turning off. He has every right to choose. And we, who do not have the right to choose in his place, have a duty to keep silent and not to decree on the existence of others, including death.