There is an Italy that signs – in silence – that does not resign itself to the fact that death, when it comes, can only be a sentence.
In just fourteen days, nearly 74,000 Italians have given shape to a petition born of the deepest pain and the most courageous clarity: the petition demanding the right to choose how to say goodbye to life, when every other possibility has been extinguished.
Today, before the Senate of the Republic, that question has become a bill. The signatures collected, 73,994 in total, are the tangible evidence of a collective urgency, the echo of thousands of stories, of families, of patients, of people who no longer wish to experience the end of life as a time suspended between suffering and legislative limbo .
The popular bill, supported by the Legal Euthanasia campaign, therefore calls for anyone living with an irreversible illness, with unbearable physical or mental suffering, and with full capacity to understand and choose, to be able to access—within a certain 30-day timeframe—a procedure for medically assisted dying through the National Health Service. It therefore simply calls for the protection of a right, respecting those who choose and those accompanying them.
A proposal that, yes, was born outside the government buildings, but not against them. It was born in the squares, markets, provincial bars, and universities, where hundreds of volunteers collected signatures and listened to the voices of the Italians who, through their simple signature, wanted to have their say.
It is an initiative that unites different generations and backgrounds, which speaks to both believers and non-believers, because it concerns the very idea of individual freedom and social compassion .
Furthermore, it comes at a time when Parliament is debating a government bill that, according to its proponents, risks undermining the right established by the Constitutional Court in its ruling 242 of 2019. They call it a "trap law," because it maintains constraints and obstacles that make legal euthanasia almost impossible.
