Young man's death triggers euthanasia debate

By CATHERINE FIELD

PARIS - France seems set to join a lengthening list of European countries that permit euthanasia after a grim case in which a mother tried to kill her 22-year-old son who had been crippled in a car accident and had begged to be allowed to die.

If France decides to change its laws, it will be the biggest country in the world to officially allow mercy killings.

Three other European nations permit doctors to turn off a patient's life support in strictly defined conditions.

The anguished national debate was triggered by the case of Vincent Humbert, a young man who was left mute, blind and paralysed after an accident in 2000.

The only part of his body that he could move was a thumb, and he used it to write a letter to President Jacques Chirac last year, seeking permission to end his life:

"You have the right to issue a [presidential] pardon and I am asking you for the right to die."

But Humbert's requests for an assisted death were repeatedly turned down.

His mother, Marie, after warning the authorities that she would do everything to end her son's suffering, last month smuggled barbiturates into the hospital and injected him with them.

But the dose was not enough to kill him, only put him in a coma. The task was finished two days later by the doctors who turned off his ventilator.

Humbert died a day after his book, I Ask for the Right to Die, was published.

His funeral was the occasion for an outpouring of grief at the small town of Berck-sur-Mer, on France's Channel coast. Hundreds of people attended, including staff from the hospital where he had been a patient. Chirac sent a senior aide to represent him, as well as a wreath of white flowers.

The service, whose every detail had been planned by Humbert, included a poignant song, Le Paradis Blanc (The White Paradise) by his favourite singer, Michel Berger, and a message that was read out by his father:

"My death should not be considered a suffering that causes you regret and pain. You must accept my departure as something simple and natural."

But whether Humbert's death was "simple and natural" has posed a huge legal and ethical dilemma.

For one thing, the authorities are at a loss about how to proceed against the people who ended Humbert's life. His mother was taken into custody for 12 hours and then released, and finally was placed at her own request in psychiatric care.

Of the team of doctors who closed down his life support, lead physician Frederic Chaussoy has courageously said he will take all responsibility. Justice Minister Dominique Perben has urged "the greatest humanity in applying the law".

In the face of this legal impotence, many are now lobbying for the laws that bar medically assisted death to be changed.

"It is complete hypocrisy," says Bernard Kouchner, a doctor and former Health Minister and a founder of the humanitarian organisation Medecins sans Frontieres. "Half of the deaths in resuscitation units are from life-support machines that are switched off."

Other powerful voices, though, are against. Corinne Zerbib, a psychiatrist and, for three years, a paraplegic, said the Humbert case had been inflamed by the media interest in his appeal to Chirac, and suggested that people who were clinically depressed because of a chronic disability could be "encouraged to commit suicide" by a law that tolerated assisted deaths.

Le Figaro newspaper said: "A law that permits euthanasia, however prudently worded, would open a loophole in the most universal of principles, the respect for life, and the damage would be irreparable,"

That position is shared personally by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, but some in his Cabinet want the laws relaxed.

The likely outcome is a no-holds-barred debate in Parliament, where scores of MPs from across party lines are calling for a change. They are backed by opinion polls conducted in the aftermath of Humbert's death. They found that more than 80 per cent of respondents want the laws to be changed.

Such thinking shows how France has changed in 30 years, from being a conservative, largely Catholic country to a nation that shares the secular practices of its northern, Protestant neighbours.

Indeed, there are parallels with the intense debate in the 1970s that culminated in the right to abortion.

France's decision may be influenced by euthanasia laws in other countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.

Their model is the Dutch law, introduced in April last year to provide a legal code for a medical practice that had been widespread. It says patients must face a future of "unbearable, interminable suffering"; the request to die must be voluntary and well-considered, and doctor and patient must be convinced there is no other solution; a second medical opinion must be obtained and life must be ended in a "medically appropriate" way.