Abstract

Italian Parliament is slowly elaborating a discipline of Advance Healthcare Decisions: but the currently discussed text is extremely ambiguous and heavily marked by the idea that human life is an undisposable good. This essay severely criticizes the parliamentary project and makes some proposals for rules assuring a «self-examined deliberation». The future Act should dispose advance decisions to be formulated with the assistance of a doctor at the presence of one or more witnesses; a few decisions could be legally preformulated. According to the age of the unconscious patient having not declared his decisions, a judicially controlled procedure should be imagined, eventually leading to interruption of treatments.