Imagine for a moment you have been paralyzed in a bed of a hospital for months, or maybe years. Your entire body can’t move except for your eyes. You keep seeing all your dreams, which you have been working hard for, right in front of you, but which are impossible to achieve. You also keep thinking of the day of the accident, you had never thought that a simple mistake could ruin your life forever. The beep of some sort of machine is driving you insane, you have always hated the plain yellow color of the walls, and worst of all your family and friends haven’t visited you for days. The only thing that keeps you alive is a machine that injects nutrition and oxygen into your body. What would you rather do, keep on hoping for a miracle, or bring your suffering to an end?
Nowadays there is a big discussion in the world on legalizing euthanasia or not, but before we get through this, we have to go into more detail of what this is.
“Euthanasia, from the Greek “good death”, is the intentional killing by act or omission of a dependent human being for his or her alleged benefit.” Killing by act means giving a lethal injection to the patient, like a high dose of morphine, and killing by omission means not providing necessary and ordinary food, care and water.
Only in few countries, like the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland, this way of ending a human life is legalized, but the main problem is in Italy, because the Catholic Church has a very big influence on all this. Religious people believe that God is the author of life, which is an inviolable gift from the moment of conception until natural death. He is the only one who has the authority to take it away, in fact the direct and intentional killing is forbidden in the 5th of the 10 commandments, and euthanasia is the case. Catholic religion also believes that every human being has the duty to follow God’s plan. This means that even if a person is suffering physically or mentally on earth, they just have to wait to find their perfection in eternal life.
But what if the person doesn’t believe in the Catholic religion, and his/her only desire is to bring his/her extreme pain to an end? Well, this is the case of an Italian man, Piergiorgio Welby, who, in 2006, fought with all his soul against the Italian politics and the Vatican. Since he was a teenager he has had a muscular dystrophy, but towards the end of his life his disease got worst, transforming his body into a vegetative state. On September 22nd, 2006 he sent an open-video letter to the president Ciampi to ask him to legalize euthanasia, because the life that he was living, didn’t have the dignity to be called life any more. This video was shown on the national television creating months of debate and involving the whole entire nation. Eventually, they gave the permission to proceed. It was December 20th when Piergiorgio Welby asked he could listen to Bob Dylan for the last time, before doctors started injecting sedatives.
So, at this point, a question comes to my mind: if God is the one who knows us and loves us the most, wouldn’t he understand the pain and the suffering that we would have if our eyes were the only part of our body still alive?
Think for a moment, if you had been paralyzed in a bed of a hospital for months, or maybe years, what would you rather do, keep on hoping for a miracle, or bring your suffering to an end?
Camilla Bianco (4E) – Corrispondente dagli USA