| Popis: |
After two judgements by the Italian constitutional Court (the first one - No. 242/2019 - related to the decriminalisation, under well-defined conditions, of the article No. 580 of the penal code: support or incitement to commit suicide, and, the second - No. 50/2022 - related to the referendum held in regard to the partial repeal of article No. 579 of the penal code: murder of the consenting party), the issue of the physician assisted suicide (PAS) has been recently regulated by the bill of law No. 3101, approved by the Italian Chamber of Deputies, currently before the Senate and registered with the No. 2553.To assess from the healthcare ethics perspective whether the bill of law can be considered an helpful legal tool to address the problems of both sick people who request PAS and the health professionals caring for them.A systematic analysis of the bill of law has highlighted four critical issues: 1) PAS left out from the doctor-patient relationship; 2) the mutual exclusion between PAS and palliative care; 3) the dependency on life-sustaining treatments (DLST) to get PAS procedure as a condition discriminating against sick people not dependent (DLST represents one of the four conditions covered by the Italian constitutional Court judgement No. 242/2019 in order to exempt someone for the crime of aiding or inciting someone else to commit suicide); 4) the conscientious objection setting the rights of the doctor and the sick person against each other. Meaning. The bill of law does not take into account both the concrete problems of the sick people asking for hasten their death through the PAS procedure and those of the health professionals caring for them; it seems rather that the legislator's primary concern was to provide the follow-up to the solicitations of the Constitutional Court, only guaranteeing a political compromise. The bill of law therefore goes against the interpretation of the right as a system of rules taking into account the modern complexity of the disease-death paradigm which drawn up the law No. 219/2017. |
