Terri Schiavo, the severely brain damaged woman at the centre of a right-to-die controversy in the US, has died in a Florida hospice almost two weeks after her feeding tube was cut off.
A spokesman for her parents said Mrs Schiavo, 41, died as her husband Michael Schiavo and parents Bob and Mary Schindler argued over whether the parents should be at her bedside when she died.
The two sides fought in court for more than seven years over whether the stricken woman, who suffered crippling brain damage following heart failure 15 years ago, should be left to die.
"It is with great sadness that it has been reported to us that Terri Schiavo has passed away," Paul O'Donnell, a Franciscan monk who acts as spokesman for the parents, said.
He said the parents and other close family had been allowed into the room after the woman's death.
"They've been requesting, as you know, for the last hour to try to be in there. And they were denied access by Michael Schiavo."
The death came hours after the Supreme Court refused a parent's request, for the sixth time, to look at the case.
The US Congress had also sought to pass legislation to have her feeding tube reinserted.
Mrs Schiavo had been in what courts ruled was a "persistent vegetative state" since her heart briefly stopped in 1990, depriving her brain of oxygen.
Courts had long sided with her husband and legal guardian, Michael, in ruling she would not have wanted to live like this and should be allowed to die.
Vatican
Shortly before Mrs Schiavo's death was announced, a senior Vatican cardinal hit out at those who failed to stop her death, saying they were "accomplices" to her murder.
"In doubt, be for life and avoid what in practice and without euphemisms would represent a murder, to which it is impossible to be a passive observer without becoming an accomplice," Vatican cardinal Renato Martino said.
"Her state has inappropriately been defined as "vegetative" because it is true that this woman is unable to communicate, but probably, as top experts in this field suggest, she suffers from her condition," cardinal Martino, the head of the Vatican Council for Justice and Peace, told Vatican Radio.
"The prolonged lack of food is transforming itself in an unjust death sentence of an innocent person in one of its most inhuman and cruel forms, that of hunger and thirst."
-AFP/Reuters