200 empty wheelchairs with rose balloons filled Piazza del Popolo Nov 4, urging Senate to reject assisted suicide bill. ProVita: “Don’t kill me.” Only 33% get palliative care.
Newsroom (06/11/2025, Gaudium Press ) Two hundred empty wheelchairs, each crowned with a rose-colored balloon, stood in silent formation across Piazza del Popolo on November 4, transforming one of Rome’s grandest public spaces into a stark protest against a Senate bill that would decriminalize assisted suicide in Italy.
Organized by the pro-life group ProVita & Famiglia, the flash mob delivered a blunt plea: “Non mi uccidere” — “Don’t kill me.” The display, arranged in precise rows beneath the square’s Egyptian obelisk, symbolized the nation’s sick, disabled, elderly, and vulnerable, whom organizers say are being offered “cynical shortcuts to death” instead of expanded care.
Italy’s legal landscape on end-of-life choices has shifted unevenly in recent years. Article 579 of the penal code still imposes six to 15 years’ imprisonment for anyone who “causes the death of a man with his consent.” Yet a 2019 Constitutional Court ruling carved out an exception: no punishment applies when the patient is on life support, suffers an irreversible pathology, and freely consents.
That decision stemmed from the case of Marco Cappato, acquitted after escorting Fabiano Antoniani — the DJ known as Fabo, left quadriplegic and blind by a 2014 car crash — to a Swiss clinic for assisted suicide in 2017.
In 2022, the Chamber of Deputies passed legislation formalizing a patient’s right to request medical aid in dying under strict conditions: adulthood, capacity to consent, and an irreversible illness causing intolerable suffering. The bill has languished in the Senate for three years, with ProVita & Famiglia now mounting a final push to block it.
Organizers cited national data showing only 33% of Italians eligible for palliative care actually receive it, with coverage plummeting to 4–5% in some regions. “Thousands of families are abandoned without adequate health support,” the group said.
The protest’s rhetoric was uncompromising. ProVita warned of a “drift toward assisted suicide” that could spiral into “a state-sanctioned massacre” of the lonely elderly, the depressed, and people with disabilities. Legalization, it argued, would normalize suicide as “just another social and health service.”
Massimo Gandolfini, head of the Family Day movement, addressed the crowd alongside the wheelchairs. Drawing on experiences in the 13 countries that have legalized assisted dying, he said initial cases balloon into thousands annually — including young people with mental illness.
“In a moment of suffering, I myself might think about death,” Gandolfini said. “But it is precisely then that society must help people live — not offer suicide as an escape from pain.” He called for greater investment in palliative care, psychological support, and social inclusion.
Among the participants was Emanuel Cosmin Stoica, a writer and disability activist who uses a wheelchair. His presence underscored the protest’s core claim: that the vulnerable seek dignity through care, not death.
- Raju Hasmukh with files form CNA
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