Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
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| Vincent Lambert |
Sign the petition: Protect Vincent Lambert's Life (Link).
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| Kevin Yuill |
Vincent Lambert has become central to the right-to-die debate in France. His face has appeared in French media over the past six years as a symbol of a passionate argument over his future and the future of euthanasia law in France. Lambert, 42, a former nurse, has spent the past 11 years in a vegetative state since suffering severe brain damage from a 2008 motoring accident.
His high-profile case, which pits his wife and five of his siblings against his devout Catholic parents, a sister and a half-brother, has become a judicial soap opera. It has also divided France, where euthanasia is illegal but doctors are allowed to put terminally ill patients into deep sedation or to withdraw their treatment altogether. The case turns on questions about the degree of Lambert’s consciousness, and about whether or not he would wish to live in such a condition.
Since 2013, Lambert’s medical team has favoured removing the feeding and water tubes that keep him alive. His parents have resisted. On the evening of 20 May, a French court dramatically ordered doctors to resume life support, reversing an earlier judicial ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that said Lambert should be removed from life support. This follows a request by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities at the United Nations, which demanded that the removal of nutrition and hydration be delayed pending further study.Yuill examines the issues in the case:
There are several significant elements to the story. The first concerns Lambert’s condition... His doctors consider him to be suffering not from ‘brain death’, but rather from severe brain damage. He can open his eyes. He can look at a person. He wakes up, sleeps, smiles, sometimes cries, and responds to stimulations – but there is little evidence that he can communicate.
Lambert, who breathes on his own, does not benefit from his life, his doctor and his wife and five of his siblings argue. ...
Second, as the medical team has hinted, the question of assisted suicide and euthanasia overshadows the case. Lambert could have had his treatment removed had he left a living will, which are legal in France. Doctors may withdraw care under a 2005 law that says life should not be prolonged ‘artificially’ through ‘unnecessary or disproportionate treatment’. Those opposing the withdrawal of hydration and nutrition point out that a precedent might be set where those whose lives are considered to be ‘without meaning’ might be starved to death.The Lambert case may affect Organ Donation:
There is another concern. Setting a precedent for Lambert might endanger other young people in similar circumstances because of the potential that their organs might be considered more valuable than their lives. From 2020 in the UK, organ donation will be automatic under the term ‘presumed consent’. A person will have to opt out, actively, of organ donation. The Lambert case is significant for the UK. Will medical teams make decisions about the value of a young accident victim’s life based on the desirability of his or her organs?Yuill shows how the Lambert case shows the euthanasia lobby lie.
The Lambert case also gives the lie to assisted-dying campaigners’ purported concerns for autonomy. Lambert has no say in the matter – it is impossible to work out what his wishes are. Wesley Smith, with the Patients Rights Council, has argued that cases like this are less about a ‘right to die’ than about having ‘no right to live’. Everyone would be up in arms if a vulnerable person in care was starved to death, but that is where the Lambert case is heading – towards a medically unnecessary but, in some people’s view, a socially desirable killing.
It is not surprising that right-to-die advocates have leapt upon the case, despite it not being about autonomy or rights. Former French president Francois Hollande used the case in 2014 to publicise his attempt to change the law to allow ‘medical assistance to end one’s life in dignity’. Michel Neveu, a representative of the French campaign for euthanasia and assisted suicide – L’Association pour le droit de mourir dans la dignité (ADMD) – said Lambert ‘would have told his wife that, if he were in a state like the one we know today, he would like to benefit from deep sedation…’.
Right-to-die campaigners already project their worst nightmares (‘I would never want to live like that’) on to disabled people. As a result, the lives of many disabled individuals are valued as considerably less worthy than others. It is not that Lambert suffers, as neuroscientists noted – it is that his continued existence is an inconvenience. Rather than allow him to live out whatever limited life he has, many in French society argue that it is ‘undignified’ for his life to continue.Yuill then concludes that food and drink are not futile.
Whereas aggressive medical treatment can and should be withdrawn when it is futile, denying a vulnerable person the food and drink necessary to keep them alive cannot be seen as futile. Lambert’s death will only serve a social purpose. There are no medical reasons at all for it. French society will be stepping off a moral precipice should it decide to starve Lambert to death.
Sign the petition: Protect Vincent Lambert's Life (Link).
Kevin Yuill teaches American studies at the University of Sunderland. His book, Assisted Suicide: The Liberal, Humanist Case Against Legalisation, is published by Palgrave Macmillan. (Buy this book from Amazon (UK).)
Kevin Yuill teaches American studies at the University of Sunderland. His book, Assisted Suicide: The Liberal, Humanist Case Against Legalisation, is published by Palgrave Macmillan. (Buy this book from Amazon (UK).)
2 comments:
I have been speaking out against this sort of thing since 1993, when Dr. Arnie Aberman, the Dean of U of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine, started pushing for the amalgamation of Toronto's hospitals (so that they could then push two-tier privatization of hospitals where the wealthy would be seen immediately, and the restrof the public would have to wait; and for an 'aggressive' organ donation program) so as to make medicine more profitable for the physicians themselves.
Do not think physicians are altruist until you have proof. Some are simply heartless profiteers.
I have taken this from the online Wikipedia definition of euthanasia.....
Nazi Euthanasia Program
Main article: Action T4
Hartheim Euthanasia Centre, where over 18,000 people were killed.
A 24 July 1939 killing of a severely disabled infant in Nazi Germany was described in a BBC "Genocide Under the Nazis Timeline" as the first "state-sponsored euthanasia".[47] Parties that consented to the killing included Hitler's office, the parents, and the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious and Congenitally Based Illnesses.[47] The Telegraph noted that the killing of the disabled infant—whose name was Gerhard Kretschmar, born blind, with missing limbs, subject to convulsions, and reportedly "an idiot"— provided "the rationale for a secret Nazi decree that led to 'mercy killings' of almost 300,000 mentally and physically handicapped people".[48] While Kretchmar's killing received parental consent, most of the 5,000 to 8,000 children killed afterwards were forcibly taken from their parents.[47][48]
The "euthanasia campaign" of mass murder gathered momentum on 14 January 1940 when the "handicapped" were killed with gas vans and killing centres, eventually leading to the deaths of 70,000 adult Germans.[49] Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors and a leading authority on the T4 program, contrasts this program with what he considers to be a genuine euthanasia. He explains that the Nazi version of "euthanasia" was based on the work of Adolf Jost, who published The Right to Death (Das Recht auf den Tod) in 1895. Lifton writes:
Jost argued that control over the death of the individual must ultimately belong to the social organism, the state. This concept is in direct opposition to the Anglo-American concept of euthanasia, which emphasizes the individual's 'right to die' or 'right to death' or 'right to his or her own death,' as the ultimate human claim. In contrast, Jost was pointing to the state's right to kill. ... Ultimately the argument was biological: 'The rights to death [are] the key to the fitness of life.' The state must own death—must kill—in order to keep the social organism alive and healthy.[50]
In modern terms, the use of "euthanasia" in the context of Action T4 is seen to be a euphemism to disguise a program of genocide, in which people were killed on the grounds of "disabilities, religious beliefs, and discordant individual values".[51] Compared to the discussions of euthanasia that emerged post-war, the Nazi program may have been worded in terms that appear similar to the modern use of "euthanasia", but there was no "mercy" and the patients were not necessarily terminally ill.[51] Despite these differences, historian and euthanasia opponent Ian Dowbiggin writes that "the origins of Nazi euthanasia, like those of the American euthanasia movement, predate the Third Reich and were intertwined with the history of eugenics and Social Darwinism, and with efforts to discredit traditional morality and ethics."[42]:65
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