The chemo denied, death, trial. That of refusing treatment against the leukemiaby the young woman Eleanor Bottaro “it was not a free choice that her parents decided to respect, but an option consciously adopted by the parents themselves, despite the fact that the doctors had informed them of the impossibility for their daughter to recover without chemotherapy”. It is a passage of the reasons – reported by the Corriere del Veneto – for which, on March 23, the Cassation rejected the appeal of the Paduan Lino Bottaro and his wife Rita Benini, confirming the two-year sentence for the manslaughter of the daughter, who died on August 29, 2016. The judges of the Supreme Court carefully reconstruct the story of Eleonora, who at the age of seventeen discovered that she was ill with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and who opposed the therapies despite the fact that the doctors had promised her 80 percent of chances of survival. Supporting her were her parents, avid supporters of alternative medicine professed by Ryke Geerd Hamer, a German doctor who was disbarred precisely because of her anti-scientific theories.
They refuse chemo for their daughter with leukemia, Eleonora dies at 17: parents sentenced to 2 years
Eleonora, who died because she refused chemo: parents sentenced to two years
Lino Bottaro and his wife have always defended themselves by arguing that refusing the treatments suggested by the doctors of Padua was a choice made independently by their daughter and for this reason, among the reasons for the appeal, they recalled a 1998 sentence of the Venice juvenile court who “decided to take into account the wishes of a nine-year-old girl suffering from leukemia, who had refused chemotherapy as too invasive and debilitating”.
But according to the judges of the Cassation, Eleonora’s case “goes beyond any relevance of the issue relating to the minor’s right to self-determination” and this because “due to her age, the girl did not have the perception of the real possibility of dying, being strengthened by a sense of immortality and the convictions of their parents, who had always opposed the treatments they ideologically refused (…) even the minimal ones, such as a sample or a hydrating drip». The student from Padua was “conditioned by the decisions of her parents, whom she trusted blindly (…) who had told her that chemotherapy was not necessary, indeed she was harmful”.
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The judges placed emphasis on the fact that the girl «accepted as a fact the treatments that her parents offered her without even knowing what they were and how the girl was dominated by her parents’ beliefs, to which she had become accustomed and which she had made her own. And in fact the referring judge pointed out that where the parents chose treatments, even if they were invasive, such as injections on the back, the girl did not oppose it and did not even bother to understand what it was about, “limiting herself to define the same ‘strange stuff’, with total acceptance».