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Piergiorgio Welby (Rome, 26 December 1945 - 20 December 2006) was an Italian poet, painter and activist whose three-month-long battle to establish his right to die led to a debate about euthanasia in his country. Welby was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy as a teenager in the early 1960s. The disease progressed, and in 1997 he became unable to breathe on his own. He became politically active in the right-to-die movement, and in 2006 he publicly declared his wish to refuse the medical treatment that kept him alive. The case was controversial, with liberal politicians supporting him and conservatives and the Vatican speaking out against his cause. After three months, he was allowed to die, though he was denied a church burial. ==Life and career== Born in Rome, the son of Alfredo Welby, a footballer playing for A.S. Roma, Welby was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at the age of 17. During the 1960s, he became influenced by the hippie movement, extensively travelling throughout Europe from 1969 to 1971 and using drugs to help forget his disease; back in Italy, he devoted his life to poetry and painting, supporting himself by giving private lessons. During the 1980s, he cured his drug dependency with the help of a methadone-based therapy which, while successfully detoxifying him, accelerated the progression of the disease, irreversibly paralyzing him from his waist down. At this time, he met his future wife Mina while she was traveling to Rome with her parish. On July 14, 1997, Welby suffered a respiratory insufficiency that left him completely unable to breathe naturally. He depended on mechanical ventilation and artificial feeding and communicated through a speech-synthesizer.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 url=http://www.lucacoscioni.it/welby_biografia )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Piergiorgio Welby」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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