From the International Herald Tribune. In a related story, "Pope reaffirms life amid heated right-to-die case." Thanks to Gregg for the tip.ROME -- Despite a warning from the president, Italy's government on Feb. 6 passed an emergency decree to keep a woman who is in a vegetative state alive and on a feeding tube, circumventing a high court decision that she be allowed to die.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's cabinet passed the decree the day a private clinic was to remove Eluana Englaro's feeding tube (pictured). The 37-year-old woman has been in a vegetative state since a car accident in 1992.
Englaro's father had won a lengthy court battle to remove the tube, saying it was not his daughter's wish to remain in a coma.
The case has divided Italy.
The emergency decree states that feeding a patient through a tube "can in no case be suspended."
Berlusconi said the government had acted because Italy lacked clear legislation on such matters. Euthanasia is illegal in Italy, which has no laws governing whether people can specify treatment in the event they are unconscious and incapacitated.
At a news conference Friday after the cabinet meeting, Berlusconi said that not acting "would make me feel responsible for not coming to the rescue of a person whose life is in danger."He said that Englaro "breathes on her own," that her "brain cells send electric signals" and that she could, "in theory, have a child."
Berlusconi also said the government would enact the decree even though President Giorgio Napolitano said he would not sign it to make it legally binding.
Instead, Berlusconi said, the cabinet planned to introduce it as a bill in Parliament within the next three days.
In a letter to the cabinet, Napolitano said he did not believe that Englaro's case required an emergency decree.
He said that the "reciprocal respect between powers and organs of the state" would suffer if the government intervened in a matter that had already been decided by the courts.
The Vatican praised the government's decree. Some center-left politicians and constitutional scholars criticized it.
The government's intervention came after a lengthy legal saga.
In November, Italy's highest court ruled that Beppino Englaro could remove his daughter's feeding tube.
The government blocked that decision, but the Constitutional Court then ruled that the government could not interfere in a matter that had been decided by the nation's highest court.
Englaro was moved this week to a private clinic in Udine in northeast Italy, which agreed to remove the feeding tube after public clinics refused.