Vincent Lambert, the severely disabled Frenchman who was at the centre of a legal battle, has died after his doctors cut off his supply of food and water.
Lambert’s parents, who are Catholic, had fought for him to be kept alive, but doctors and Lambert’s wife argued that he would have wanted to die. The legal battle had lasted for six years.
The Church regards the removal of food and water as euthanasia. Lambert’s father said his son’s death was “murder in disguise”.
What Church leaders said
Pope Francis, in a clear reference to Lambert’s case, tweeted: “We pray for the sick who are abandoned and left to die. A society is human if it protects life, every life, from its beginning to its natural end, without choosing who is worthy to live or who is not.”
Cardinal Robert Sarah said he was praying for Lambert’s soul, saying that he “died as a martyr, a victim of the frightful madness of the men of our time. I pray for his family and especially for his parents, so brave, so worthy. Do not be afraid. God watches.”
Archbishop Michel Aupetit of Paris encouraged all Paris’s priests to say Mass for Lambert. In May, the archbishop warned against treating “human beings as functional robots that can be eliminated or scrapped when they are no longer useful”.
What the media said
Most mainstream media sources presented the story as part of a “right-to-die” debate, even though Lambert had not taken the decision to have food and water removed.
However, some commentators, especially Christians, raised the alarm about the case. At First Things, Wesley Smith noted that the courts had judged that Lambert’s forced dehydration was in his “best interests”. But “he did not require mechanical breathing assistance or kidney dialysis. All the poor man needed to survive was what every human requires: food and water.” The Lambert case could be a turning point, Smith said: in America, the similar case of Terry Schiavo had been decided the same way. Smith added that “unconscious and minimally conscious patients are dehydrated in all 50 states as a matter of medical routine.”
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