Church fury as coma woman allowed to die

Italy's Supreme Court provoked the fury of conservatives yesterday by ruling that a father can disconnect the feeding tube that has kept his daughter alive in a coma for nearly 17 years.

In one of the most painfully emotive cases this Catholic country has confronted for years, the court overturned the earlier rejection by an appeal court of the father's right to end his daughter's life. The ruling was denounced by conservatives as the legalisation of euthanasia in Italy, but by the father, Beppino Englaro, as "a way out of hell".

Eluana Englaro was still a teenager in 1992 when she was injured in a car crash which put her into a "persistent vegetative state", from which she has shown no signs of emerging in the subsequent 16 years. Her father has been fighting for nearly 10 years for the right to remove the feeding tubes that keep her alive in her hospital room in the northern Italian town of Lecco. In a first reaction to the court's ruling last night, he said: "We live in a state of rights. At last there is a way out of this hell."

The Supreme Court endorsed the original ruling by a court in Milan in July which accepted that Ms Englaro's coma was irreversible, and that before the car crash she had stated her preference to die rather than be kept alive artificially. The Englaro case bears strong resemblances to that of Terri Schiavo in the United States, who was also in a persistent vegetative state and whose husband fought for 15 years before winning the right to end her life.

In the days leading up to the ruling, the Church had turned its big guns on the court, with L'Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian bishops, declaring that if it ruled in the father's favour it would be "enacting the first death sentence in Italy since 1946". But Vito Mancuso, a theology professor in Milan, commented: "To use the word 'homicide' in a case like this, in the faces of the parents, seems to me very violent. There is no question that we are talking about the ending of a life, but not every interruption of life can be described as assassination."

Conservatives wasted no time in condemning the court's ruling. Alfredo Mantovano, under-secretary in the Interior Ministry, commented: "One part of the magistracy refuses to protect human life. It privileges more or less veiled forms of euthanasia and of consensual homicide."

Professor Mancuso added, "The ideal solution would be to have a living will. But as in this case that was not possible, the only reasonable thing is to entrust the decision to the ones who are best placed to decide, due to their ties of love and kinship. Nobody in the world loves this girl more than her parents."