Abortion and euthanasia, when life and death enter politics

Occasionally, sporadically, bioethical issues come to the forefront of daily political news. We could also talk about “biopolitics”: both terms make clear the meaning and significance of these topics, such as abortion and euthanasia, for people’s lives. Almost all of us find ourselves facing delicate choices from this point of view and there are more and more of us, given the aging of the population, the lengthening of the average age and the tendency towards a decrease in the birth rate.

The two terms that we have used instead of the periphrases of “termination of pregnancy” and “assisted death”, in the first case with evident euphemistic intent, however, make it clear that these issues also bring with them interesting methods of communication and representation from the point of view of social view, as they are applied to the most varied fields.

In general, it is argued that opinions on bioethics tend to polarize because instinctive and personal feelings are aroused that are very vivid and to some extent independent of our more general ideological beliefs given that biographical elements enter into the evaluations. It is generally an experience of personal or family pain that directs us towards a choice and therefore a position.

The consideration is certainly true. However, it is equally reasonable that on certain issues almost no one supports a position of absolute extremism: very few people believe it is desirable to use abortion as a normal way of terminating a pregnancy, almost no one thinks it should be prevented at any cost, even in the most details such as rape; Likewise, there are very few minorities who support the right to practice so-called assisted suicide on anyone and in any case, or that it should be denied to a patient who suffers in an unspeakable way from an illness that is certainly incurable.

Political and ideological transversality should allow us to find agreements towards common moderation, that is, an articulation of the rules with respect to the many nuances that these situations can present. This should theoretically also translate into greater ease of finding legislative agreements. As we are seeing these days, however, the opposite is happening. On the one hand, on abortion, the majority itself is split, with the defection of the League; on the other hand, in the PD the Catholic component often dissociates itself from the more progressive one. Even at the end of life we ​​have witnessed an institutional clash with the Emilia-Romagna region which has subtly tried to apply a more lax rule, against the indications of the National Bioethics Committee which also, by a non-unanimous majority, had instead established more rigorous.

These splits within parties and alliances, rather than favoring moderation agreements tending “to the centre”, so to speak, complicate the choices, which are deferred, leaving room for autonomous decisions, therefore sentences of the judiciary, and subjective initiatives such as those by Marco Cappato.

Things in these areas are very complicated. Each of us should make a sincere and honest reflection. How should we behave, for example, in the case of a very elderly person who is tired of living, bedridden, immobilized in a room in which he must be cared for even for the slightest needs, who expresses the desire to leave and refuses food and water? To what extent can even a simple infusion of physiological or glucose solution become “therapeutic fury”? Is it legitimate to indulge her, if for those who assist her this means making her “die of hunger and thirst”? They are very complicated moral and existential tangles, in which the attitude of the parties almost always sounds to me like an annoying propaganda attempt.