Doctors were removing all life support last night from an Italian woman in a coma whose “right to die” has triggered a constitutional crisis and provoked an intervention from the Pope.

As Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Government was rushing an emergency decree through parliament ordering the restoration of medical care for Eluana Englaro, the clinic in Udine that is treating her ignored appeals for a delay.

“We are proceeding with the total suspension of artificial nutrition,” Carlo Alberto Defanti, her neurologist, said. At her father’s request, medical staff at the clinic began reducing water and nutrients through feeding tubes on Friday to Ms Englaro, who has been in a vegetative coma for 17 years. Doctors said that her “path to death” would almost certainly become irreversible by the end of this week and perhaps sooner. She was being given sedatives to calm muscle spasms, they said.

Giuseppe Campeis, a lawyer for Ms Englaro’s father, Beppino, who won a decade-long legal battle last September to let her die, said: “We are continuing with medical procedures aimed at ensuring a gentle death.”

The case has sparked an open power struggle between Mr Berlusconi and President Napolitano. In a last-minute move on Friday Mr Berlusconi sided with the Vatican and drew up an emergency decree to prevent Ms Englaro’s death. President Napolitano refused to sign it on the ground that the Prime Minister could not arbitrarily overturn a legal ruling and that such a sensitive issue had to be fully debated by parliament.

The decree was due to reach the Senate tomorrow but was urgently rescheduled for today. It passes to the lower house tomorrow. The decree states that, pending complete legislation on euthanasia, food and water to sustain life or “provide for the physiological goal of easing suffering” cannot be suspended for those unable to take their own decisions.

Beppino Englaro and friends of his daughter have testified that before her accident she declared that if she ever found herself in a coma she would not want to be kept alive artificially.

Ms Englaro has been in a coma since January 1992, when her car slid on ice and smashed into a lamp post as she was driving back from a party at a friend’s house. She was previously cared for at a church-run hospital in Lecco on Lake Como, near her home but was transferred last week to La Quiete, a private clinic in Udine, which said that it was prepared to help her to die.

Maurizio Sacconi, the Health Minister, said that the clinic was not qualified to help Ms Englaro to die because it was not a hospice for the terminally ill but primarily a rest home for the aged. He said that he had sent a team of health inspectors to the home to investigate “irregularities”.

The Englaro case has become a symbol for the Vatican’s “pro-life” campaign but also for right-to-die campaigners. Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, head of the Italian Episcopal Conference, said that refusing food and water to Ms Englaro was murder. “A light is going out, the light of a life,” he said.

Pope Benedict asked the faithful yesterday to pray “for those who are gravely ill but cannot in any way provide for themselves and are totally dependent on the care of others”. He did not refer directly to Ms Englaro but reaffirmed “the absolute and supreme dignity of every human being”.

Mr Englaro was baffled by the latest twists in the controversy. “All I can say is that sometimes reality goes way beyond the wildest imagination,” he told Spain’s El PaÍs newspaper yesterday. “The Church has nothing to do with this issue.”

The tussle over Ms Englaro’s life has revived accusations that the Vatican is dictating Italian policy. Mr Berlusconi, who had previously stayed out of the controversy, reacted after Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, implored him to “stop this crime against humanity”.

Mr Berlusconi said he believed that he represented the feelings of most Italians. Opinion polls, however, suggest that Italians are divided, with 47 per cent in favour of Ms Englaro’s “right to die”, 47 per cent against, and 6 per cent undecided.

Lives on hold

- Terri Schiavo became a US celebrity during her 15-year right-to-die battle, which ended in 2005 when her life support was switched off. Her husband wanted her to die; her parents did not

- Policeman Gary French Dockery emerged from a coma after seven-and-a-half years, talking animatedly. He was shot in the head in 1988. He became silent the day after and died a year later

Sources: CNN, Time

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