His mother says he cried when he learned his doctors would starve him to death.
This week ends a six-year battle for the life of Vincent Lambert, the 42-year-old, fully conscious, former psychiatric nurse hospitalized in north-eastern France since his motorcycle accident in 2008.
A high French court recently ordered Lambert’s hospital to deny him food and water by removing the feeding tube he requires to live. His ordeal of slow starvation should take about two weeks.
There are two ways to talk about this slow starvation.
Some use words like “vegetative” and “semi-conscious” to describe Vincent Lambert’s condition. Vincent’s mother and father don’t agree. They fought against his death in a series of desperate legal appeals.
Vincent Lambert’s mother, Viviane, told the European Court of Human Rights,
“He sleeps at night, wakes up during the day and looks at me when I talk. He only needs to be fed through a special device and his doctor wants to deprive him of this so that he can die.”
Vivian and her husband Pierre stood by their powerless son’s bed Sunday, to watch his only means of food and hydration withdrawn.
“It’s murder in disguise, it’s euthanasia,” the 90-year-old Pierre mourned.
Which callous doctors and family members opposed them? Vincent’s wife, six of his eight children, and his doctors pressed legally to see him die. Thus, Vincent’s parents are silenced.
“This ruling removes the last legal obstacle to ending his treatment,” announced Patrice Spinosi, the lawyer for Mr. Lambert’s wife Rachel.
Who else has spoken?
The state of France. In other words: a coercive, materialist state ever lustful to pull God out of heaven by destroying his image in man. Technically, euthanasia is illegal in France. In this case the doctors and courts devised a wicked work-around: Vincent will be legally starved to death in lieu of receiving a lethal dose of drugs.
French President Macron, an atheist, claims Lambert’s death depends on something else. It depends on the desires of his wife in consultation with her husband’s physicians. He refuses to intervene for Vincent’s life.
Thus a government picks up the sword to destroy the most defenseless in our midst. In Europe, as in America, the deified state decides who among us gets the right not to be killed.
Christians with their Bibles open stand righteously outraged at such thinking.
We know Vincent’s life was created by Almighty God and bears the image of his maker.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Gen. 1:27).
When the French government decides Vincent Lambert’s life is no longer worth living, we see a dystopian, statist grasp for power that assaults the Christian foundations of Western civilization.
