Trieste woman commits assisted suicide

(ANSA) - ROME, DEC 12 - A 55-year-old Trieste woman committed assisted suicide by injecting herself with a lethal drug on November 28 becoming the first Italian to kill herself with the direct assistance of the national health service on the basis of a recent ruling by the Constitutional Court, the right-to-die Luca Coscioni Association said Tuesday.
    The unnamed woman had been suffering from secondarily progressive multiple sclerosis and wanted to end her suffering.
    The woman, said the association, is "the first Italian woman to have completed the procedure envisaged by the Constitutional Court with the Cappato ruling, with the direct assistance of the National Health Service." She is the third person followed by the association to have access to assisted voluntary death in Italy, the fifth to have been given the go-ahead, and the first in the northeastern Friuli region. (ANSA).