Vegetative Frenchman set to lose life support amid final challenge

524

REIMS, France, May 20, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Doctors were due from Monday to
start switching off the life support of a quadriplegic Frenchman who has been
in a vegetative state for the last decade, in a case that has divided France
and even his own family.

But the parents of Vincent Lambert have launched last ditch challenges to
the court decision to halt the nutrition and hydration he receives in the
Sebastopol Hospital in the northern French city of Reims.

The patient’s doctor, Vincent Sanchez, is due to start switching off the
support systems from Monday, according to Lambert’s parents.

They want care for Lambert to continue but other relatives concur with
doctors that the humane path given Lambert’s condition is to end life
support.

Lambert was left quadriplegic with severe brain damage after a 2008 car
accident and his case has become a symbol of the controversy over right-to-
die laws in France.

Their lawyers said Sunday that the parents would be making multiple final
court bids to have the treatment continued, as well as having Lambert’s
doctor removed and struck off the medical register.

The lawyer for the parents, Jerome Triomphe, said three challenges were
planned, without giving further details.

– ‘Why this rush?’ –

In 2014, doctors, backed by Lambert’s wife Rachel, five of his siblings
and his nephew Francois, decided to stop his nutrition and hydration in line
with France’s passive euthenasia law.

But his parents, devout Catholics, and his half-brother and sister
obtained a court order to block the move on grounds his condition might
improve with better treatment.

But early this year, a French court sided with Sanchez’s decision to stop
the care keeping Lambert, now aged 42, alive.

The ruling was upheld last month by France’s State Council which decides
on the validity of laws and legal decisions.

France’s Conference of Bishops added its voice to the controversy
Saturday, calling on authorities to wait on an opinion being worked on by the
UN committee on disabled rights. “Why this rush to lead him to death?” the
clerics asked in a statement.

The UN committee on disabled rights earlier this month asked France to
suspend the decision to withdraw the life support, while it conducts its own
investigation, which could take years.

France’s Health Minister Agnes Buzyn said France would answer the
committee but was not under any legal requirement to abide by its request.

– ‘Very different matter’ –

The issue has also become a political controversy in the run-up to next
weekend’s European elections.

Francois-Xavier Bellamy, a candidate in the European Parliament elections
for the opposition Les Republicains, said he “could not understand the hurry”
to switch off the support and called on President Emmanuel Macron to
intervene.

“If we enter down a dangerous path which consists of saying a life that is
dependent, one that is fragile, sick, is not one worth being lived, then we
will build an inhumane world,” he told French television.

He said that there were 1,500 patients in a similar position to Vincent
Lambert in France. The parents had also asked Macron to intervene to stop
what they called a “crime of the state”.

But Nathalie Loiseau, who is standing for Macron’s party in the elections,
said the head of state could not reverse a court order.

“All he (Macron) can do is pardon someone who has been condemned and this
is very different to what the parents of Vincent Lambert are requesting,” she
said, acknowledging that the parents were going though a “tragedy”.

French law allows so-called “passive euthanasia” for seriously ill or
injured patients with no chance of recovery, in which the means for keeping
someone alive are cut off.

Active euthanasia, by which a person deliberately causes a patient’s
death, is illegal in France despite recent efforts to ease legislation
dealing with the terminally ill.