France Let a Wife Sentence Her Disabled Husband to Death

“Vincent Lambert died today, at age 42. He became a quadriplegic in a ‘vegetative state’ in 2008. France’s highest court ruled that his food and water should be removed. Make no mistake, the French government is guilty here. It could and should have intervened to protect this citizen. But the bad actor here seems to be the person with legal power over Vincent’s fate: his wife. Mr. Lambert was not in excruciating pain. He seemed to live comfortably on simple food and water support. He responded to stimuli. Vincent’s mother reported: ‘He sleeps at night, wakes up during the day, and looks at me when I talk,’ she said, according to Reuters. ‘He only needs to be fed through a special device and his doctor wants to deprive him of this so that he can die, while legal experts have shown that this is not necessary.’ She also emphasized that he has reacted to their voices, stating, ‘In May, when learning about his planned death, he cried.’ We have no room to throw stones. Too few of us recall the horrors of Terri Schiavo’s death in 2005. As I wrote at the time: Here’s a woman who was not in a coma, was not brain dead, and didn’t require elaborate machines to stay alive—just a nutrition drip in the stomach, of the sort any one of us might need after, say, a tonsillectomy. And yet American courts decided that her adulterous husband had the right to impose her death by starvation and thirst. As St. Louis neurologist William Burke told author Wesley Smith, as he was researching his book on euthanasia Forced Exit. ‘Imagine going one day without a glass of water! Death by dehydration takes ten to fourteen days. It is an extremely agonizing death.’ We should prepare ourselves. Throughout the West, collapsed birth rates and huge cohorts of retirees will exert enormous pressure on health systems. Countries with few babies, and few workers paying in, will have a very strong motive to accept active euthanasia. As in a poison pill, or a needle in the arm. It’s quicker, cheaper, and in one sense more ‘merciful’ than the ‘passive’ method of letting people like Mr. Lambert die of thirst. That’s in our future. And I think judges and policymakers in places like France are purposely authorizing the slow, agonizing deaths by thirst of patients such as Mr. Lambert. Why? Precisely because they’re so horrible. The public, sentimental and easy to manipulate via almost unanimous media, will respond not by demanding that sick people like Mr. Lambert be saved. But instead, that we kill them more quickly and painlessly. Like the animals that Darwinism tells us we really are.”

​“France Let a Wife,” The Stream, July 11, 2019

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