Samantha D’Incà as Eluana Englaro, the problem of the living will

“For our daughter we only want peace. His life is no longer life, it is pure suffering. Samantha would never have wanted an existence like this, in a hospital bed, without conscience, fed with a probe, tormented by pain. He is thirty years old and has no hope of improvement. Our little girl is gone, let her go“. These are the words of Giorgio D’Incà and Genzianella Dal Zot, Samantha’s parents, who fight the same battle made for years by Eluana Englaro’s father and who told their story to Republic. In Italy there is the living will, the possibility of leaving provisions to stop artificial nutrition. Samantha, however, did not leave written indications in this sense and it is necessary to reconstruct her will as it was for Eluana.

On November 12, 2020, the thirty-year-old fell in front of the house breaking her femur. The next day she was operated on in Feltre and left the hospital a few days later. Here began the ordeal with the legs swelling and the first aid that only tells you to keep them up. On 2 December, hospitalization for pneumonia, then the passage to Treviso with collapsed lungs. “His brain hadn’t received oxygen for too long. Our Samy had entered the hospital with a fracture, she came out like a vegetable ». Maybe a bacterium is causing the downfall.

There will be a battle to establish guilt, but first the parents want to get the girl out of the prison she is in. Samantha breathes on her own, but is fed with a probe. Doctors could stop feeding. Law 219 of 2017, which introduced the living will with the advance treatment provisions. «Each informed patient, able to understand and act, can accept or reject the treatment, or single acts of the treatment, proposed by the treating physician. The subject under treatment can revoke the consent at any time, even if the choice leads to the interruption of the treatment “.

The problem is that Samantha did not leave written information and, like most Italians, she did not file the bio-test. The parents ask to be able to do it in his place following his thoughts about it. The father explained: «He always told us he didn’t want to depend on anyone. That’s what I pointed out to the hospital ethics committee when they told me they wanted to put the Peg on Samantha. Why prolong his sufferings? ».

According to the law, the provisions must be expressed in writing, dated and signed in front of a public official, a doctor or witnesses. Public act or private writing says the text. For many associations this is a law that no one remembers and promotes. For another one is working theLuca Coscioni Association collecting signatures for the Referendum Legal Euthanasia. 500 thousand are needed. The referendum aims to partially repeal the criminal law that prevents the introduction of legal euthanasia in Italy.