Italy faces constitutional crisis over coma woman

[amalgamate]

wait it doesn't say how she died... did they remove the life support?

[amalgamate]

Eluana Englaro, the comatose woman at the centre of a euthanasia debate that has divided Italy and sparked a constitutional crisis, died last night at the age of 38, four days after doctors began to remove her life support.

they did

[Al-khiyal]

They had ceased feeding her, taking that decision and action was what sparked the flurry of activity to save her 'life'.

[amalgamate]

after 17 years being in a vegetative state, did they think there was even a chance that she'd come out of it? docs said it was persistant. another 17 years later she'd still be exactly in what she's been in all these years- artificial life.

I don't know why some ppl could be so... common senseless.

[amalgamate]

"Do you understand that concept of needing to be free? Do you?" says Englaro. ...I know what Eluana would have wanted in this situation because she's already told us."

A year and a day before her own accident, a friend of Eluana called Alessandro crashed his motorbike, suffering serious brain damage. In great distress, Eluana told her father: "If something like that ever happened to me, you have to do something. If I can't be what I am now, I'd prefer to be left to die. I don't want to be resuscitated and left in a condition like that."

I wonder why the decision of removing life support from a critically brain damaged, persistantly vegetative patient relies on his/her former competent decision whether they'd like to 'die' or not if succumbed to that state?