(LifeSiteNews) — On November 4, 200 empty wheelchairs filled Rome’s Piazza del Popola, a rose-colored balloon bobbing in the air above each one. The powerful display of absence was a potent protest against an assisted suicide bill being considered by the Italian Senate.

As Catholic News Agency reported, the display in the square, “one of Rome’s most iconic and monumental spaces,” featured the wheelchairs in “arranged in meticulously ordered rows,” placed there by “the pro-life ProVita & Famiglia association as part of a flash mob with a direct and unsettling message: ‘Non mi uccidere.’” Translation: Don’t kill me.

The display reminded me of the grim scene that unfolded in front of Westminster in London, England last November after Parliament voted in favor of assisted suicide. People gathered in wheelchairs openly wept; pro-life commentator Caroline Farrow, standing with them, wrote, “The atmosphere is one of profound sadness and terror. A dark cloud has descended over the UK.”

In fact, it is a remarkable fact — and one almost entirely ignored by both the mainstream press and euthanasia activists — that the disability rights community is leading the charge against assisted suicide and euthanasia in nearly every country where the debate is currently raging. In the UK, every single one of the more than 350 disability rights groups in the UK opposes the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. A majority of parliamentarians have ignored them.

The same is true in Canada, where disability rights groups — although ideologically diverse on many issues — are virtually in lockstep in their opposition to the expansion of so-called “Medical Aid in Dying.” Inclusion Canada took the Canadian government to the United Nations, resulting in a rare and pointed condemnation of the Liberal death program and the planned expansions to euthanasia by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The UN similarly condemned France’s proposed euthanasia bill, bluntly stating that it undermines the “right to life of persons with disabilities.”

One of the ugliest facts of our euthanasia debate is how universally disability rights groups and individuals with disabilities have been ignored. In Canada, the government acts as if they simply do not exist as they systematically expand the euthanasia regime. In the UK, parliamentarians disregarded their pleas. It is difficult not to conclude that lawmakers do not believe their warnings, or they do not care. Perhaps both.

Thus, the Italian campaign — oriented toward raising awareness about the threat of assisted suicide to those with disabilities — is unfortunately necessary. “Currently in Italy, anyone who ‘causes the death of a man with his consent’ is punishable by six to 15 years in prison, according to Article 579 of the penal code,” CNA reported. “However, in 2019 the country’s constitutional court partially modified this legislation, ruling that no one will be punished for killing ‘a patient who is kept alive by life-support treatments and suffers from an irreversible condition.’”

Notably, the constitutional court’s ruling came after the acquittal of Marco Cappato for going with famed producer Fabiano Antoniani to Switzerland for assisted suicide in 2017; Antoniani wanted to kill himself because an accident several years earlier had rendered him quadriplegic as well as blind. In 2022, Italy’s lower parliament “passed a bill regulating a patient’s right to request medical assistance in dying based on certain conditions, such as being of legal age or suffering from an irreversible illness.” The Senate has been debating it ever since.

The 200 empty wheelchairs are part of the ProVita & Famiglia campaign to stop the assisted suicide bill, and to represent the plight of people who “are asking Parliament for more care, more rights, more dignity but are instead faced with cynical shortcuts to death.” According to the organization, Italy has embarked on a “drift toward assisted suicide that could lead to a veritable state-sanctioned massacre of the sick, the elderly living alone, the depressed, and people with disabilities.”

The public campaign was attended by writer and activist Emanuel Cosmin Stoica, who is disabled. “In a moment of suffering,” he said, “I myself might think about death, but it is precisely then that society must help people live and not offer suicide as an escape from pain.” Instead, “the state must invest in assistance, psychological support, inclusion, and social networks that leave no one alone.”

In country after country, people with disabilities have been readily accepted as collateral damage by euthanasia activists and their political supporters. Perhaps, this time, it will be different.