Poet’s Death ignites Euthanasia Debate

Piergiorgio Welby died on Wednesday after his doctor, Mario Riccio gave him an intravenous cocktail of sedatives and switched off the life support system that had kept him alive for nine years. Welby had advanced muscular dystrophy and was confined to bed.

Welby, a poet who wrote thousands of blog entries on the rights of the terminally ill would have turned 61 next week. He had expressively begged to let him end his life legally which had ignited passionate deliberations over the right-to-die.

Hours after his death conservative lawmakers demanded the arrest of the doctor. Luca Volonté, leader of the Christian Democratic Party said that the death “cannot go unpunished, if only because it was committed in such a violent, scandalous and exploitative way.”

The 47 year doctor however claimed that the case of Piergiorgio Welby was not a case of euthanasia. Instead it was a case of refusing treatment. He said that he believed he had not broken the law and was willing to answer magistrate's questions about Welby's death.

Euthanasia is the practice of ending the life of a person in a painless or minimally painful way either by lethal injection, drug overdose, or by the withdrawal of life support. Euthanasia is banned in predominantly Catholic Italy and the Vatican opposes euthanasia. Doctors who perform euthanasia can face up to 15 years in prison.

Direct forms of euthanasia, even doctor-assisted suicide, are illegal in Italy. But Italian law allows patients, other than those with psychiatric problems and infectious diseases, to decline treatment.

Before he died, Mr. Welby sought a judicial ruling that would clarify Italy’s conflicting laws regarding unwanted medical treatment and allow him to die as he wished. In fact he had claimed that his medical treatment was an increasing “torture.”

Emma Bonino, a Radical Party leader and minister in the center-left government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi, appealed for stronger laws allowing sick patients to die. She said, “Piergiorgio Welby did not invent a phenomenon. He gave a voice to a reality — voice, body, suffering — to a reality that exists, and to which it is more simple, if more cruel, to close one's eyes."

Many political analysts still feel that it is unlikely that Italy will join Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland in Europe in legalizing more direct forms of euthanasia.