Vincent Lambert case
Vincent Lambert (20 September 1976 in
Châteauroux – 11 July 2019 in
Reims) was a French man who in 2008 fell into a
persistent vegetative state after sustaining critical injuries in a
road accident. He had been working as a
psychiatric nurse since 2000, and had been married since 2007 to a woman named Rachel, then a nursing student. After an 11-year
legal battle between two opposed sides of his family (most prominently his widow, Rachel Lambert, willing to let him die according to the wishes he reportedly expressed prior to the accident — but never formalized into a written
living will — and his mother, Viviane Lambert, determined to keep him alive, according to her strong
Traditionalist Catholic convictions), the courts eventually allowed him to die through
starvation in July 2019. Like the
Terri Schiavo case in the United States, his case spurred highly publicized activism from the
anti-abortion movement, the
right-to-die movement, and
disability rights groups, in
France and
French-speaking countries.
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