A study just published in the Journal of Medical Ethics showed that nearly 2% of all the people who die each year in Belgium are euthanized without their request or consent. Yes, this is not a mistake. You read well. They are killed without them asking anyone to kill them; and this is totally legal!
Belgium law is so ‘avant-garde’ (that’s how a progressive/liberal would put it, I suppose) that it not only allows doctors to help patients kill themselves but these doctors have also the right to kill the patients though the administration of lethal drugs if these patients are judged unable to make the decision for themselves.
They call that progress!
Within this context the decision of the Grand Council of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to jump on this pro-euthanasia bandwagon gains more significance. Malta’s appointee to the Court Chief Justice Emeritus Vincent Degaetano and four other judges were right on target when they said that because of its decision the ECHF had forfeited the title of ‘The Conscience of Europe’ which it had accepted to mark its 50th anniversary in 2010.
Let us look at the facts.
Psychiatric nurse Vincent Lambert, 38, was left severely brain damaged after a 2008 road accident. The family were divided on what should be done. His wife and other relatives said that he would never have wanted to be kept alive artificially, and they wanted the doctors to stop feeding him so that he then dies. Lambert’s doctors were of the same opinion.
His mother, his father and a few other relatives wanted doctors to keep on feeding him and thus keep him alive. They argued that he was suffering from a “handicap”, not an “incurable brain disease”.
There was a long legal battle. The parents won some stages but the wife and the doctors won the final stage when the judges of the ECHR voted 12 to five that intravenous support can stop. The ruling is considered landmark as it sets a legal precedent for all of the Council of Europe’s 47 member states.
I watched long sections of the trial which has been videoed and placed on the website of the Court. Of particular interest was the part when the president of the Court asked the judges whether they have any questions to make. Our own Judge Degaetano was the only judge to put questions. His six or seven questions were penetrating ones. I cannot say the same about some of the answers.
The Maltese judge and the four other dissenting judges rightly argued that this case was about a disabled man who had a failure at one level of the brain but not at all levels. He was not on life supporting machines so he could breathe on his own. He was unable to eat and drink on his own so he needed help to fulfil these two basic life-sustaining necessities. Once fed, he could digest food on his own.
The dissenting judges asked:
“What, we therefore ask, can justify a state in allowing a doctor...in this case not so much to ‘pull the plug’ as to withdraw or discontinue feeding and hydration so as to, in effect, starve Vincent Lambert to death?
“What is the overriding reason justifying the state in not intervening to protect life? Is it financial considerations? None has been advanced in this case. Is it because the person is in considerable
pain? There is no evidence to that effect. Is it because the person is of no further use or importance to society, indeed is no longer a person and has only ‘biological life’?”
While Degaetano and the other dissenting judges believed that a person in Lambert’s condition was a person with fundamental human dignity and must therefore receive ordinary and proportionate care or treatment which includes the administration of water and food, the majority of the judges decided otherwise and mandated that the death sentence be administered to a disabled person although, most probably, they would have been against the death sentence had the individual been a callous criminal.
Sad, very sad indeed.