Italy has moved closer to the legalisation of assisted suicide.

The lower house of parliament voted for a new law — by 253 votes to 117 with one abstention — which would permit “voluntary medically assisted death” for terminally ill patients.

To qualify, patients would have to be suffering from an irreversible illness with an “unfortunate prognosis” which causes “absolutely intolerable physical and psychological suffering”.

The law does not have popular support, even though there is an active and vocal euthanasia lobby in Italy. In 2019, Italy’s Constitutional Court in 2019, ruled that assisted suicide should not be punishable in certain cases. It left it up to Parliament to draft a law setting out the details.

In February the court blocked an attempt to hold a euthanasia referendum, insisting that it was Parliament’s job to decide.

A columnist for L’Avvenire wrote: “in our legal system there can be no room for a right to death, not even an implicit one. The choice to help a person die or not must remain with individual doctors so that it continues to be a tragic exception as much as possible, and does not flank other therapeutic and care offers, as if appropriate therapies and death were equivalent choices.”