Right-to-die decision is murder: Vatican

4 Feb 2009, 9:35 am   -   Source: AAP
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The Vatican has waded back into a euthanasia debate rocking Italy, as the family of a comatose woman welcomed the decision to transfer her to a hospital to die.

The Vatican on Tuesday waded back into a euthanasia debate rocking Italy, as the family of a comatose woman welcomed the decision to transfer her to a hospital to die.

"Stop this murder!" Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, the Vatican's health minister, told La Repubblica daily, two days after Pope Benedict XVI rejected euthanasia as a "false" answer to suffering.

The remarks came as 37-year-old Eluana Englaro arrived early on Tuesday at a hospital in the northeastern town of Udine where she can die peacefully, her neurologist Carlo Alberto Defanti said.

Her feeding tubes are to be removed in three days, according to doctors cited by the Italian media.

Englaro, who has been kept in a vegetative state since a car accident 17 years ago, has become a symbol for Italy's right-to-die movement - and for the Roman Catholic Church's impassioned argument for the sanctity of life.

"To stop giving food and liquids to Eluana is equivalent to abominable murder and the Church will not cease to proclaim this loud and clear," Barragan said in the newspaper interview.

His comments come after the Pope spoke out against euthanasia following his Angelus blessing on Sunday arguing that those in pain should instead be helped to confront it.

Adversaries of the "right to die" backed by the Vatican and the powerful Italian Church strongly opposed the bid by Englaro's family to remove her from the Catholic clinic in Lecco and take her to a hospital that would remove her feeding tube.

But on Tuesday, Englaro's father Beppino said her transfer to the geriatric "Calmness" clinic in Udine is "the first step... towards the liberation of my daughter. It seems we have finally succeeded".

Defanti, who is part of a team of 15 doctors and nurses to care for Englaro, added that "she will not suffer".

Englaro's plight has been the subject of intense debate in Italy over the past decade.

Last month, a court in Milan overruled a regional order barring hospitals in the area from halting her life support, ending an intense legal fight.

The decision came after Englaro's father won a 10-year battle with an appeal court ruling in November that allowed doctors to remove her feeding tube - a decision that Barragan strongly rejected.

On Tuesday, Italy's Health Minister Maurizio Sacconi said the government was searching for a new way to prevent her death, after several anti-euthanasia groups called on it to interrupt in the affair.

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