On Monday 11 Nov., Giulia Bovassi, Assistant Researcher of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights, spoke during the informal hearing at the 2nd and 10th Joint Committees of the Senate of the Republic on medically assisted death where Bill Nos. 65, 104, 124, 570, and 1083 were discussed.
The points on which the hearing focused are the right to life, its inviolability, inalienability and unavailability as an ineliminable prerequisite both of the exercise of any other right deriving from it and of any attempt to legislate on assisted suicide or euthanasia. This is in line with Judgment 242/2019, which reaffirms it. The criterion of quality of life is challenged as a principle of discrimination, contrary to equality, between worthy and unworthy lives.
Secondly, the principle of self-determination was discussed, with particular reference to the authenticity of consent in situations severely marked by physical or psychic suffering.
The concern expressed in the 135/2024 judgment about the risk of abuse as a result of legalised forms of assisted suicide and the build-up of ‘indirect social pressure’ on the population, which is consequently made to feel like a burden and a social cost, is argued. Cases and statistics on the international situation confirming this concern are brought in. The risk inherent in the DDLs discussed of falling down the slippery slope that has affected international legislation on the subject is pointed out.
The rationale of palliative care, in which to invest in order to respond to thousands of people who want to exercise their right to care, was highlighted; a rationale opposed to a ‘right to die’.
It has been emphasised in this sense what good medicine, good clinical practice, based on proportionality and therapeutic alliance, on the deontological and bioethical principles of beneficence, not maleficence, are irreparably compromised by such practices.
There is a desire to focus on investments in palliative care, hospices, pain therapy because an incurable patient remains a curable person.