In his letter about Eluana Englaro, Joseph Gaffarena got some of his facts wrong (TMIS, 22 February). This unfortunate woman was left in a persistent vegetative state for 17 years after a serious traffic accident. It is to be noted that doctors increasingly use the term “persistent” rather than “permanent” since there have been cases, rare indeed, where people have woken up from such a state after a number of years.

Throughout the years Eluana was at a clinic in Lecco run by nuns, the Suore Misericordine, who lovingly cared for her, washed and fed her, and wheeled her around in the fresh air whenever possible. During the day she opened her eyes and sometimes even coughed. She was not, and this can never be emphasised enough, on any kind of medication whatsoever and had no machines attached. She was just a severely disabled person who needed to be given liquefied food through a feeding tube. Hospitals, old peoples’ homes and residences for the disabled are filled with babies, sick people, the elderly and the disabled who are unable to feed themselves and would die if they were not fed by those who take care of them. Many of these people are destined to remain in their present condition till the end of their lives. Is Mr Gaffarena suggesting that we should stop feeding them because their life is not worth living anyway and they can therefore be disposed of?

Eluana Englaro was not being subjected to any over-zealous treatment by doctors, which would have amounted to that extraordinary treatment which the Catholic Church disapproves of. Liquefied food is an ordinary treatment no one should be deprived of, not even an animal. The nuns pleaded with Eluana’s father to let them take care of her freely till the day when her life would come to its natural end. His answer was always adamantly negative.

To die of hunger and thirst is a horrendous way of dying so much so that the doctors at the clinic in Udine where she was staying gave her sedatives, and this despite the fact that they were always saying that she would feel no pain and the head doctor even said that she had died 17 years earlier. Can one for a moment imagine the futility of giving sedatives to a corpse?

In the days preceding her death, the father of Terry Schiavo, the American girl who shared the same fate as Eluana, wrote to the latter’s father to describe in graphic terms the horror he had felt seeing his daughter (whose husband had insisted that the feeding tube should be taken away) die an agonizing death. Thankfully, the Italian girl was spared much of this because God took her just over two days after her feeding tube was removed and this without doctors (or rather angels of death) or even her father being present.

Eluana Englaro was killed because her life was deemed as not being worth living in our dechristianised society, increasingly unable to tackle the moral problems of illness, disability and old age and where only the fit, the beautiful and the seemingly clever take centre-stage. It is interesting to remember that Adolph Hitler, even before World War II had started, put to death in gas-wagons around 70,000 Germans with physical and mental disability whose lives were deemed unworthy, undignified and with no hope whatsoever for the future. In such tragic circumstances the adage that “lontani da Cristo ci si imbarbarisce” never rings more true.

Jacqueline Calleja