ROME. Being able to decide when to end your life if you are in unsustainable conditions and without the possibility of recovery and thus stop your suffering. It is the request that in 16 years, like a red thread, has linked many faces that have become real emblems, from Piergiorgio Welby to Dj Fabo, to the latest in chronological order: that of Mario, 44 years old from the Marches, quadriplegic immobilized in read for ten years that he asked for legal access to assisted suicide and for which the necessary drugs were defined a few days ago, and that of Antonio, 43, a quadriplegic for eight years, for which the Court of Fermo, with a sentence, ordered the ASL to verify the conditions of access to the procedure.
Assisted suicide, Mario’s audio message “Now I can die. My life is a prison”
The first to pose the theme of self-determination of the patient and of the choice about the end of life was Piergiorgio Welby, activist and co-president of the Coscioni Association. Affected for years by muscular dystrophy, he sent a letter to the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano in which he asked for euthanasia. On December 16, 2006, the court of Rome rejected Welby’s lawyers’ request to put an end to the “therapeutic fury”, declaring it “inadmissible” due to the legislative vacuum on this matter. A few days later, Welby asked the doctor Mario Riccio to put an end to his ordeal. Hedgehog therefore removed the respirator to Welby under sedation, and was later acquitted of the murder charge of the consenting party.
In 2007 it was then the case of Giovanni Nuvoli, sick with ALS of Alghero, who also requested the detachment of the respirator: this time, however, the court of Sassari rejected the request and the carabinieri blocked the doctor who wanted to help him. Nuvoli then went on a hunger and thirst strike, letting himself die.
But it is in 2009 with the case of Eluana Englaro, the young woman from Lecco who remained in a vegetative state for 17 years, which the country was divided between those in favor of her father Beppino’s desire to enforce her daughter’s desire when she was still alive to put an end to her existence if she found herself in similar conditions, and the opposites. She various sentences rejecting the requests of family members, until the Supreme Court, twice, ruled in favor of the suspension of artificial nutrition and hydration.
Also Mario Fanellisuffering from ALS who died of natural causes in 2016, asked for a law on euthanasia.
And always in 2016, Walter Piluduformer president of the province of Cagliari suffering from ALS, died obtaining the detachment of the respirator: the court of Cagliari has in fact authorized the health facility where he was to stop the treatments.
“Mr. Mattarella, my name is Fabo and I would like to be free to die”
In 2017 the case of Dj Fabo (Fabiano Antoniani), who died in Switzerland in the facility where he had gone accompanied by Marco Cappato of the Luca Coscioni Association to obtain assisted suicide. Dj Fabo had turned to the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella to intervene at the end of life. At 39, blind and quadriplegic following a serious car accident, he asked to “be free to die” and found it “scandalous” that the parliamentarians did not have “the courage to take matters into their own hands for so many citizens who live like me” .
Patrizia Coccoinstead, he fought his battle against ALS for 5 years, then he chose to say enough. Nuorese, 49 years old, she was the first in Italy to get to ‘pull the plug’ after the entry into force of the Biotestamento law in 2017. She did so after giving her consent to the doctors for the renunciation of mechanical ventilation and for the initiation of deep palliative sedation.
The last case is precisely that of Mario: he is the first patient to have obtained the legal go-ahead for medically assisted suicide in Italy, according to the procedure established by the Cappato / Antoniani sentence of the Constitutional Court.