Mother arrested for carrying out son's dying wish

A French mother has been arrested after trying to carry out her severely disabled son’s wish to be killed.

Marie Humbert, 47, injected barbiturates into her 22-year-old son’s drip in the resort town of Berck-sur-Mer, near Calais.

Now son Vincent, who was left mute, blind and quadriplegic after a car crash three years ago, is in intensive care and his mother in custody.

Last year ago French President Jacques Chirac refused his plea for a mercy killing.

Family lawyer Hugues Vigier said the son had sought to die since December last year.

“It’s truly the only thing that Vincent Humbert has demanded for a long time, and he confided in his mother as the only person capable of carrying out such a gesture of love,” Vigier said.

“She has done the most terrible thing a mother can do and yet she sees it as a marvellous thing because he wanted it so terribly,” Vigier said.

The bid to end his life coincides with the publication of his book I Ask for the Right to Die, which Vincent Humbert laboriously spelled out using one thumb.

Marie Humbert told a newspaper she planned to help her son to die despite assisted suicide being illegal in France.

“The hardest thing will be that I won’t be able to mother him or touch him anymore. But if I don’t do it, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror,” she said.

“When every day your child tells you: ‘Mother, I can’t bear to suffer any more, I beg you, help me’ – what would you do in my place? If I have to go to prison, I will go.”

A year ago Vincent wrote to Chirac asking him to allow an exception to the ban on euthanasia so his mother could end his life.

“You have the right of pardon and I ask you for the right to die. I want you to know you are my last chance,” he wrote.