ParfumGigi@aol.com

19 mars, 2008 21:02

PARIS (AP) — A French woman with a rare, painful and disfiguring facial tumor who had sought doctor-assisted suicide was found dead Wednesday at her home in eastern France, a government official said.

The case of 52-year-old Chantal Sebire had drawn headlines across France and revived a national debate about the right to die.

Sebire, a former schoolteacher and mother of three, was found dead at her home in the eastern town of PlombiGeres-les-Dijon, a government official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The circumstances of her death were not immediately clear.

On Monday, a court in the city of Dijon rejected Sebire's request to be allowed to receive a lethal dose of barbiturates under a doctor's supervision. It refused the request for doctor-assisted suicide because of French law and out of concern for medical ethics.

Unlike in France, euthanasia is legal in both Belgium and the Netherlands, and Luxembourg is in the process of passing a law to allow it. In Switzerland, counselors or physicians can prepare the lethal dose, but patients must take it on their own.

Sebire's case caught France's attention when the media published heartbreaking before-and-after pictures that made her suffering instantly apparent. The tumor burrowed through her sinuses and nasal cavities, causing her nose to swell to several times its original size, and pushing one of her eye sockets out of her head.

Sebire, who has children aged 29, 27 and 13, was diagnosed nearly eight years ago with esthesioneuroblastoma, a rare form of cancer. The illness had left her blind, and with no sense of smell or taste, her lawyer said. She could not use morphine to ease the intense eye pain because of the side effects.

The former teacher also had difficulty eating, and she slept sitting up, propped up with pillows. She often suffered hemorrhages too, her lawyer, Gilles Antonowicz, had said.

After Monday's court decision, Antonowicz responded: "She is exhausted, at the end of her rope."

The court in the city of Dijon had said it refused Sebire's request for doctor-assisted suicide because of French law and out of concern for medical ethics, "even if Madame Sebire's physical degradation inspires compassion."

Several of France's government ministers had spoken out strongly against Sebire's request.

Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot told RTL radio that "neither the medical world nor the government can promote euthanasia, no matter how serious the illness."

Sebire's battle came several years after another high-profile French case, the death of a young man who had begged for the right to die after a traffic accident left him deaf, mute and paralyzed.

Vincent Humbert died at 22 in September 2003 after his mother allegedly gave him a deadly dose of sedatives that induced a coma, and doctors then cut his life support.

After Humbert's death, French parliament passed a law allowing terminally ill people to refuse treatment in favor of death, though it stopped short of allowing more direct methods.

Jean-Luc Romero, president of France's Association for the Right to Die in Dignity, had said French law as it stands would allow Sebire to go into a drug-induced coma, then die slowly of thirst and starvation — a possibility he called "unimaginable" and says would traumatize her family.

Sebire refused that option.

"That isn't dignified or humane, or respectful of myself and my children," she told RTL radio last week. "I want to celebrate with my children, friends and doctors, before going to sleep for good at dawn."

Sebire wrote French President Nicolas Sarkozy a letter begging him to change the law. Sarkozy's office said he was "very touched" by her situation and offered her a consultation with a panel of high-level university doctors.

Sebire's lawyer had said she was not interested.

"Madame Sebire does not have the right to die, but she still has the right to choose her doctors," he said. "In eight years, she has seen all the doctors on the planet, and that's not the solution."