Italian woman in right-to-die debate dies

Yes, she has left us," the ANSA news agency quoted her father, Beppino Englaro, as saying. "But I don't want to say anything, I just want to be alone.Englaro's doctors had said her condition was irreversible. Late last year, her father won a decade-long court battle to allow her feeding tube to be removed, saying that was her wish. In line with the high court ruling, medical workers on Friday began suspending her food and water.

But Italy's center-right government, backed by the Vatican, had pressed to keep her alive, racing against time to pass legislation prohibiting food and water from being suspended for patients who depend on them.Senators who had just begun debating the bill observed a minute of silence Monday night when the news of her death was read out in the Senate chamber.

Government officials vowed to pass the legislation even though it was too late to save Englaro."I hope the Senate can proceed on the established calendar so that this sacrifice wasn't completely in vain," Health Minister Maurizio Sacconi told the Senate minutes after the death was announced.Even if the bill had been passed in time, it wasn't clear that it would have kept Englaro alive. Alessandro Pace, constitutional law professor at Rome University, said the law couldn't have been applied to Englaro because of previous court rulings allowing her feeding tube to be removed.

Englaro's case bitterly divided Italy, with proponents on both sides of the right-to-die debate staging daily demonstrations outside the Udine clinic in northeast Italy and politicians hurling insults against each other. Pope Benedict XVI spoke out several times in the past week about the dignity of every human life."May the Lord welcome her and pardon those who brought her to this point," ANSA quoted Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, the Vatican's top health official, as saying. But he ruled out excommunicating those involved in suspending Englaro's food and water