Court Denies Food and Water To Disabled Man

[tinytherese]

 |  JUN. 29, 2019

French Court Orders Severely Disabled Man Be Disconnected from Food, Water

The Catholic Church does not require the use of extraordinary means to preserve life, but considers the provision of food and hydration to be an ordinary standard of care.

Catholic News Agency

REIMS - The highest civil court in France has ordered that food and water may be removed from a severely disabled man, who has been artificially fed and hydrated in a hospital in the country for over 10 years.

The Court of Cassation ruled Friday that Vincent Lambert, 42, can be taken off life support. This is the final ruling, and there can be no appeal, the BBC reported.

This means Lambert’s parents have exhausted their legal options in their years-long fight to keep their son alive. However, the parents said Friday that they will press murder charges if Lambert is removed from food and hydration, according to AFP.

A French court had ruled in favor of euthanizing Lambert last month. He had been briefly removed from feeding and hydration tubes May 20, when a challenge passed the Paris appeals court and the hospital was ordered to return the support.

“In any other context, killing by starvation and dehydration is considered a crime against humanity,” said Alexandra Snyder, executive director of Life Legal, a group that advocates for the vulnerable, in a June 28 statement.

“Yet in France-as in the United States-we routinely impose this type of torturous death on individuals who are disabled. This has to stop. Disability should not be a death sentence.”

Euthanasia is illegal in France. However, a 2005 law allows physicians to refrain from using “disproportionate” treatments “with no other effect than maintaining life artificially.”

Lambert, 42, has been a tetraplegic and severely disabled for more than 10 years, after he sustained severe head injuries in a traffic accident in 2008. 

Since then, Lambert has been at the center of a protracted court battle over whether to have his food and hydration removed. Lambert’s wife and six of his eight siblings have supported the removal of life support, while his parents have fought against it.

Vatican officials last month condemned the removal of food and hydration from Lambert.

In a joint statement May 21, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life, and Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said the interruption of food and hydration entail a “serious violation of the dignity of the person.”

Lambert has been described by some medical professionals as being in a “vegetative state.” Farrell and Paglia stated that though this is a “serious pathological condition,” it does not in any way “compromise the dignity of the persons who are in this condition, nor their fundamental rights to life and care, understood as continuity of basic human assistance.”

Food and water, they continued, are a form of essential care, and do not comprise “unreasonable therapeutic obstinacy.”

The Catholic Church does not require the use of extraordinary means to preserve life, but considers the provision of food and hydration to be an ordinary standard of care.

“The suspension of [food and hydration] represents, rather, a form of abandonment of the patient, based on a merciless judgment on his quality of life, expression of a culture of waste that selects the most fragile and defenseless people, without recognizing their uniqueness and immense value,” Farrell and Paglia wrote.

They also expressed the hope that an effective solution for preserving the life of Lambert can be found, and pledged the prayers of Pope Francis and the Church for that intention.

In 2015, the European Court of Human Rights approved the removal of Lambert’s life support, arguing in a 12-5 decision, that the choice to stop his intravenous feeding did not violate European rights laws.

A lower French court had previously ruled that Lambert should continue to receive food and hydration. In January 2014 a panel of nine judges in Chalons-en-Champagne said removing food and hydration is “a grave and clearly illegal attack on the fundamental right to life.”

The panel added that Lambert is “neither sick nor at the end of his life.”

Pope Francis addressed Lambert’s case during a Regina Coeli address in April 2018. He asked for prayers for people such as Lambert, “who live, at times for a long period, in a serious state of illness, medically assisted for their basic needs.”

“Every offense or wound or violence against the body of our neighbor is an outrage to God the creator,” he said, adding that, “in the flesh of these people we find the flesh of Christ.”

Source http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/french-court-orders-severely-disabled-man-be-disconnected-from-food-water

 

Thu Jul 4, 2019 - 11:38 am EST

Vincent Lambert’s mom horrified to watch French hospital murder her son

 France, Murder, Vincent Lambert, Viviane Lambert

July 4, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – “I would so much like to be with him when he breathes his last breath…” Viviane Lambert, has fought tirelessly for six years for the life of her son, but since Tuesday evening, July 2, she has also been preparing for his death. The tetraplegic and brain-damaged 42-year-old man has been deprived of food and water since Tuesday evening in order to make him die.

France has refused to react to the United Nations Committee for the Rights of Disabled Persons’ (CRDP) repeated demands in view of provisional measures that would give it time to assess Lambert’s case by suspending all irreversible acts – of which the deliberate deprivation of food and fluids are the most irreversible of all.

The CRDP reiterated its request to France for the third time this Wednesday, but to no avail.

Together with her husband, Viviane was by Vincent Lambert’s side in the hospital room in Reims where he has been locked away for six years, Tuesday evening and on Wednesday. During the coming days, things will be even more difficult than usual. Vincent’s legal guardian, his wife Rachel, has drawn up a strict schedule, fixing the times of day and night when different family members will be allowed to visit him to say goodbye. Viviane fears that her son may die alone.

During a lengthy phone call on Wednesday evening, Viviane, spoke to LifeSiteNews about her son’s situation. 

“Last night was horrible. I felt I couldn't stand it any longer. Today I feel better: I went to see my doctor and cried a lot. I'm trying to put things in perspective: I tell myself that Vincent will be with the good Lord. But he is unhappy… He was looking at us, we could see he is suffering. Is he suffering from not having drunk anything? He hasn't had anything to eat today.”

How could Vincent Lambert be looking at his mother more than 24 hours after his feeding tube was pulled, when the end-of-life protocol he is so eagerly being put through requires deep sedation? That is the procedure described by the so-called Leonetti law which organizes death by dehydration for severely ill persons or people incapable of expressing their will who have left advance directives. Deep sedation is what was given Vincent on May 20 at the beginning of the previous attempt to make him die through lack of fluids and food.

 Things appear to be going very differently this time.

“They said they gave him very mild sedation,” Viviane Lambert told LifeSiteNews. She added that one of the doctors specialized in the care of brain-damaged, minimally conscious patients who has supported Pierre and Viviane Lambert’s battle for the last six years told her there is no such thing: a patient is either sedated, or he is not.

It appears that Vincent Lambert is being dehydrated to death while remaining sufficiently conscious for his mother to perceive his reactions and to see him looking at her. She says requests for information from the doctor who initiated the death procedure, Vincent Sanchez, are often met with the response: “I can’t answer that.”

David Lambert, Vincent’s brother and one of his four family members were fighting for his life, was told that the procedure could last from two days to one month, said Viviane. It seems the doctor does not want to “go too fast” and wants to avoid Vincent having “epileptic seizures.” One can only imagine the stress this protracted and deliberate death process can cause to Vincent's loved ones.

Viviane told LifeSite about the “sadness” in her son's eyes since yesterday evening. “It was as if he were drowning – and they’re pushing him under water,” she said.

“We do what we can to reassure him, telling him that we love him,” she added. As a convinced practicing Catholic, Viviane, who seemed astonishingly serene after a very difficult day Tuesday, was happy to share that she has been able to pray at her son's bedside. He has received the last sacraments, she said, thanks to the Bishop of Reims who sent a chaplain for the last rites, but his family was not present.

“I trust the good Lord, really. Really, we are not alone, and that's what helped us fight too. People ask me how I can hold on. Yes, it's my faith, and also, he's my son. He is the flesh of my flesh. But we are supported by so many people, by Holy Masses, sacrifices and fasting: Vincent surely has the potential to go to heaven! It's not that I'm clinging to his life. It would have been a relief if he had departed naturally. But it is he who is clinging to life, and all the while it's as if his head is being pushed under water. It’s unacceptable. They’re burying Hippocrates,” she said.

The Reims university hospital where Vincent Lambert is being put to death is under heavy protection, with vigils checking visitors’ identities both in and outside the building, while all cars entering within the hospital enclosure are also being screened.

The Lambert’s lawyers have not given up their fight and are still aiming to obtain the implementation of the United Nation’s request for provisional measures.

Contact information for respectful communications: 

Reims Hospital
CHU Reims, 48 rue de Sébastopol, 51100 Reims, France

Dr. Sanchez’ email address: vsanchez@chu-reims.fr

French Health Ministry
Ministère des solidarités et de la santé 
14 avenue Duquesne, 75007 Paris, France 
Ph: + 31 1 40 56 60 00.

Source https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/vincent-lamberts-mom-horrified-to-watch-french-hospital-murder-her-son

 

It's Terri Schiavo all over again, including a spouse who's the legal guardian of the disabled person who wants them dead.

Edited July 5, 2019 by tinytherese
Some things were copied twice.

[Anomaly]

It isn’t Teri Schiavo.   She wasn’t conscious to the extent he is.  Very different in her circumstances and mental conditions.  The Church was not as against her not getting intravenous food and water.    The Teri Schiavo case happened here in Tampabay.  There is a great article about the judge in today’s Times paper.  It further fleshes out the circumstances around the case.  Teri had significant brain deterioration. 

Vincent does not seem to be as incapacitated.   It may be much more horrifying what is being done to him. 

 

[KnightofChrist]

2 hours ago, Anomaly said:

It isn’t Teri Schiavo.   She wasn’t conscious to the extent he is.  Very different in her circumstances and mental conditions.  The Church was not as against her not getting intravenous food and water.    The Teri Schiavo case happened here in Tampabay.  There is a great article about the judge in today’s Times paper.  It further fleshes out the circumstances around the case.  Teri had significant brain deterioration. 

Vincent does not seem to be as incapacitated.   It may be much more horrifying what is being done to him. 

 

It's as if we, the frogs of western society, are in a pot of water while our masters slowly turn up the heat. 

As the years pass by those deemed unfit and acceptable to exterminate will grow. One day it will not just be the mentally handicap (of varying degrees) nor will they just  be denied food and water. 

The case in the UK of the mentally handicap woman forced by a judge to abort her child was too much too soon. But that's not going away. 

[Seven77]

What happened to Teri Schiavo was just as horrific, But in this case, it's more apparently horrific. Wow… Denying something so basic as water and food, starving and dehydrating someone to death. How can his wife be down with that? And his eight kids? How old  are the kids anyway?

[tinytherese]

3 hours ago, Seven77 said:

And his eight kids? How old  are the kids anyway?

Eight siblings.

[tinytherese]

5 hours ago, KnightofChrist said:

The case in the UK of the mentally handicap woman forced by a judge to abort her child was too much too soon. But that's not going away. 

Thankfully, three appeal court judges overturned the ruling. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-uk-appeal-court-stops-forced-abortion-for-disabled-woman

[Seven77]

3 hours ago, tinytherese said:

Eight siblings.

Oh, right…  wow, I need to read more carefully! And here I am trying to get a book discussion going... lol. 

[KnightofChrist]

On 7/7/2019 at 5:43 PM, tinytherese said:

Thankfully, three appeal court judges overturned the ruling. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-uk-appeal-court-stops-forced-abortion-for-disabled-woman

Yeah, that's what I meant by too much too soon. Society isn't ready just yet to allow forced abortions.  Slowly 10-15 yrs I'm afraid we'll get there.

Edited July 8, 2019 by KnightofChrist

[chrysostom]

Rest in peace Vincent Lambert. He has passed away after being starved to death for 9 days.

Great job, France, you murdered another innocent.

The words of La Marseillaise - which will be sung this Bastille Day on Sunday - say

Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons !

Let an impure blood
Water our furrows!

Back then, you were referring to Prussia. Now you make war on the disabled. To you they are the impure ones. Margaret Sanger would be proud.

(not saying my country isn't doing such awful things but...God help us)

[chrysostom]

The European news headlines - France 24, ABC Digital, RTSinfo, L'Express - report that he has passed away after "les traitements avaient été interrompus" - treatments have been interrupted.

I, too, need several treatments per day, they're called breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you interrupt my treatments for 9 days I'm liable to pass away too.

Edited July 11, 2019 by chrysostom