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Sat 27 Sep, 2003 10:17 am
Son's Wish to Die, and Mother's Help, Stir French Debate
By CRAIG S. SMITH - NY Times
PARIS, Sept. 26 ?- "I Ask the Right to Die," written by Vincent Humbert, a 22-year-old French paraplegic, hit bookstores here on Thursday. Today he died, two days after his mother put an overdose of sedatives into his intravenous line.
She acted on the third anniversary of the car accident that left him paralyzed, mute and blind.
His death and his book calling for the legalization of euthanasia have transfixed the nation and drawn the debate over assisted suicide out of hospital wards and into people's homes.
Assisted suicide is outlawed in France but is permitted under certain circumstances in the Netherlands and Belgium. It is fully legal in Switzerland, where there are associations that help terminally ill patients kill themselves.
Radio call-in programs, television talk shows and the opinion pages of the country's newspapers have swelled with discussion of Mr. Humbert's death and what punishment, if any, his mother, Marie Humbert, should receive.
Ms. Humbert, 48, who had campaigned for the right to end her son's life, was taken into custody by the police on suspicion of attempted murder late Wednesday but was released on Thursday and allowed to see her son before he died. She was subsequently hospitalized at an undisclosed location. Her current whereabouts is unknown.
Libération, the country's largest left-wing daily, praised Ms. Humbert in an editorial headlined, "Let us end this hypocrisy." An editorial in Le Monde, France's leading newspaper, called only for a national debate but pointed out that the country's national ethics consulting committee recommended in January 2000 that a law be passed legalizing euthanasia in exceptional cases.
So far, the country's judicial system is dealing gently with Ms. Humbert, who won enormous public sympathy in her campaign for euthanasia.
Justice Minister Dominique Perben asked prosecutors in a statement today "to act with the greatest humanity in applying the law, taking into account the suffering of the mother and the young man." The lead prosecutor in the case told reporters that an official inquiry into Mr. Humbert's death would be undertaken "in due time."
Mr. Humbert's plight captured national attention last December after he wrote a direct appeal to France's president, Jacques Chirac, asking for the legal right to end his own life. Mr. Chirac wrote back that he could not grant the request "because the president of the republic doesn't have that right, but I understand your helplessness and deep despair in facing the living conditions that you endure."
Mr. Humbert then set about writing his book from his bed at the same hospital in the northern port of Berck-sur-Mer where Jean-Dominique Bauby, all but incapacitated by a stroke, wrote his haunting memoir, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Mr. Bauby died in 1997, two days after his book was published.
Mr. Humbert wrote his book with the help of a journalist, Frédéric Veille, by pressing with his thumb and nodding his head to spell out words as Mr. Veille read repeatedly through the alphabet.
In "I Ask the Right to Die," Mr. Humbert recounts with heartbreaking bitterness how his life as a healthy, careful young fireman ended when his car met an oncoming truck on a narrow country road. After enduring months of ebbing hope that he would recover any of his lost faculties ?- he even lost his senses of taste and smell ?- he decided he wanted to die and with his mother began the campaign.
Mr. Humbert had argued to be allowed to end his life legally in France because he was unable to afford the cost of transport abroad, even if it could have been arranged.
"Then, so that you understand me better, so that the debate about euthanasia finally reaches another level, so that this word and this act are no longer a taboo subject, so that we no longer let live lucid people like me who want to put an end to their own suffering, I wanted to write this book that I will never read," he wrote.
In the book, which was the second-best-selling title on France's Amazon.com Web site this morning, Mr. Humbert described asking his mother to kill him and her decision to do so. As the third anniversary of his Sept. 24 accident approached, his mother signaled her intention to kill her son in media interviews.
Ms. Humbert injected sedatives into her son's intravenous drip late Wednesday, sending him into a coma. The family then pleaded with doctors to let him die. Mr. Humbert died today after doctors abandoned efforts to keep him alive, saying in a statement that they had made their "collective and difficult decision in complete independence."
Mr. Humbert's book ends with a plea to readers to empathize with his mother and leave her in peace. "What she has done for me is surely the most beautiful proof of love in the world," he wrote.
Interesting how this is all coming to the fore again.
Today, in the Boston Globe, there was an article on a woman who can't let her mother go, even though the mother has been on a respirator for years. The hospital is pushing for the plug to be pulled (usually it's the other way around) - but of course a part of that is because Blue Cross has ruled that the patient is getting palliative care and not treatment, hence Blue Cross won't pay. See:
Boston Globe - right to die article.
And, I also read today's New York Times, which talks about a patient who everyone expected to be brain dead but who apparently has some function (ashown on an MRI). See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/magazine/28VEGETAT.html Quote:One morning just over a year after his accident, Rios was taken to the Sloan Kettering Institute on Manhattan's East Side. There, in a dim room, a group of researchers placed a mask over his eyes, fixed headphones over his ears and guided his head into the bore of an M.R.I. machine. A 40-second loop of a recording made by Rios's sister Maria played through the headphones: she told him that she was there with him, that she loved him. As the sound entered his ears, the M.R.I. machine scanned his brain, mapping changes in activity. Several hours afterward, two researchers, Nicholas D. Schiff and Joy Hirsch, took a look at the images from the scan. They hadn't been sure what to expect -- Rios was among the first people in his condition to have his brain activity measured in this way -- but they certainly weren't expecting what they saw. ''We just stared at these images,'' recalls Schiff, an expert in consciousness disorders at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. ''There didn't seem to be anything missing.''
As the tape of his sister's voice played, several distinct clusters of neurons in Rios's brain had fired in a manner virtually identical to that of a healthy subject.
There's no easy answers when it comes to this. I hope there is another national debate about it, like there was in the '70s with Karen Ann Quinlan. And, in all fairness, I think there's something to be said about wrapping such a discussion up with the right to die. I think the two are related - one is the right to die as expressed by a conscious person at the time and the other is the right to die as expressed by an unconscious person but earlier expressed to their caregiver or health care proxy, and as carried out by the health care proxy.
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