MILAN – “I have never had personal occasions, but I understand that in many cases euthanasia can almost be an act of charity”. The minister of health, Umberto Veronesi, is talking about a professional life spent among patients affected by cancer. And Veronesi intervenes last night, urged to comment on the case of Eluana Englaro, entered the “persistent vegetative state” on January 18 ’92, when she was 21 years old, and remained thus, without relations with the outside world and nourished by a tube, until to date. Without ever an illness, completely immersed in his “life-non-life”. Indeed, as his father Beppino told yesterday in Repubblica, “condemned to vegetate natural life during”. There are no official estimates of how many people there are, such as clinics, nursing homes, hospital wards, private homes. But it seems to be thousands. In Veneto, “new” cases were counted every year. It means, given the appropriate proportions, at least 500 episodes throughout Italy every year, doctors claim. Tragedies without possibility of escape. And yesterday, in the name of Eluana and of the hard position of the father, who claims the right to death for his daughter and wants “everything to happen in the light of the sun, without subterfuge”, a meeting was held at the University of Milan with Valerio Pocar, of the bioethics consultation, and the judge Amedeo Santosuosso. And an appeal has been made to the authorities, president Ciampi, to bring to light “the problem of serious moral importance” concerning “individuals who have now irreversibly lost the opportunity to experience any cognitive and emotional experience and who – not being able expressing themselves about the treatments they receive – they are found to be kept in a state of mere vegetative life for years or even decades “. a “Biocard” has been spread, that is a sort of “testamentary dispositions” about one’s own health, which has no legal value, but makes one express one’s own ideas on (textual words) “extension of my dying”. But just to understand how difficult it is to reach a certainty of certainty we must also take into great consideration the words of Professor Carlo Alberto Defanti, neurologist of Niguarda, the doctor who helped Englaro to ask the judges – who said no – the possibility of let Eluana die.
“Thirty years ago, there were no such situations, we created them and by people – he explains without hesitation – they became by-products of intensive therapy: only bodies, without thought, without communication, without the possibility of change. to say bodies without soul, without spirit “. And yet, when he tells a careful and sometimes vibrant audience his medical journey, he does not say he saw, visited, monitored the girl. Instead, he says: “I met Eluana four years ago”, using, perhaps involuntarily, a reflecting verb. Can we say that we have made acquaintance with a vegetable? It is in this lapsus the drama of fathers like Beppino, who are silent for years, who speak with formal acts, who turn – first time it happens – to the courts to ask for death. Of families who, as they say in the hall, “enter into a coma with their loved one”. Of doctors fought. “I have no solutions to put – says Minister Umberto Veronesi – but I think it is a problem that must be resolved by law”.