President

here is the acknowledgement of the absence, in effect, of the conditions
necessary to fully develop each and everyone’s personality 275 .
1. A particularly “vulnerable” section of the population: women over
sixty-five years of age
This premise seemed appropriate to better frame and justify our choice to
focus our attention on a particularly vulnerable section of the population, which
risks to see their generic and specific health needs underestimated: those of
the so-called “elderly” women.
Opening a parenthesis relative to the notion of vulnerability, it is important
to remember that it was the “Barcelona Declaration” – signed in 1998 by
twenty-two European specialists, coming from different disciplines and
philosophical perspectives, to give value to this notion, as well as those of
autonomy, integrity, dignity. These are four regulating ideas, useful not only to
analyse the crucial issues of bioethics and bio-law, but also to give direction to
the current debate on biomedicine and biotechnologies in a legal context, within
an ethics of solidarity, responsibility and justice intended as fairness. The
principle of vulnerability, which essentially expresses the idea of the limit and
fragility of human existence, is at the basis, for those who are autonomous, of
the possibility and need of every moral discussion and every ethics appealing
to responsibility and care 276 .
Returning to our topic, without intending to discuss the various
classifications of aging, we include in the concept of “old age” the “range of
problems” conventionally thought to begin at 65 years of age, which become
increasingly relevant with the passing of time and, generally, in our society after
75 years of age 277 .
Many studies today tackle the issues raised in developed countries by a
growing elderly population, but there isn’t always adequate recognition of the
strategies of cultural, social, economic, biomedical, etc. policies, necessary to
counteract the ethical prejudice of “ageism”, namely, so that the elderly
population is recognised as a possible social resource and not as a burden
encumbering on the whole of society and, in particular, on the younger
generations. In a world where the prevalent cultural and media images daily
instruct us to “take care of ourselves” in order to fight, at least in our outward
275
Italian Constitution, Fundamental principles: art. 3 “… It is the duty of the Republic to remove
those obstacles of an economic and social nature which constrain the freedom and equality of
citizens, thereby impeding the full development of the human person…”.
276
We must also stress that this notion has both descriptive and legal value: in fact, describing
a person as vulnerable means suggesting, at the same time, an ethical response of protection
and responsibility towards him/her. From this, the profound link between vulnerability and the
ethics of care. But in order for this idea to be more than a utopian principle, it is necessary for
society to indicate with absolute clarity what type of vulnerability it intends to focus on and with
what resources: in this way, the ethics of care meets the sphere of justice. As it is easy to see,
the overall message emerging from the Declaration is that vulnerability is, for the most part, due
to certain situations and that therefore everyone’s commitment must be aimed at reducing it in
its different aspects. In this way, we try to make sure that vulnerability is not an element of
exclusion but of particular consideration and more care, taking into account the equal dignity,
from a legal point of view, of every person and also of those characteristics that make him/her a
unique individual.
277 th
Cf. NBC, Bioethics and the Rights of the Elderly, 20 of January 2006,
http://www.governo.it/bioetica/pareri.
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