A terrible road accident on Friday, February 10th, shook French opinion violently. It involved an actor and comedian well-known to the French public, a certain Pierre Palmade, who, under the influence of cocaine and prescription drugs, violently hit a car carrying a young woman who was almost seven months pregnant, her brother-in-law, and her brother’s six-year-old son. The young woman, still in serious condition like her companions, lost her baby in the accident, which has reopened the debate on the legal status of the foetus in France.
The accident occurred near Melun in Seine-et-Marne, a department southeast of Paris, where the actor has a residence. The investigation revealed that the comedian had been locked up in his house for more than 24 hours with escorts, for a ‘party’ consisting of a lot of cocaine and prescription drugs, against the background of ‘chemsex,’ i.e., the practice of sexual activities stimulated by drugs. In the late afternoon of Friday, February 10th, he went out on an errand in his car, unfit to drive, thus committing the irreparable crime. He lost control of his vehicle and collided head-on with a car approaching in the opposite lane. At the wheel was a forty-year-old man, who was driving his pregnant sister-in-law and his own six-year-old son. Two passengers in Pierre Palmade’s car—escort boys—fled at the time of the accident, adding to the sordidness of the affair. They have since been found by the police.
Today, the comedian is alive and he can now be questioned by the police. He has been taken into custody. The young woman, who is now also out of danger, should be able to leave the hospital in the next few days. However, the driver and his son are still in serious condition. The family’s lawyer also revealed that the boy was “disfigured.”
What could be a banal news item of the kind that, unfortunately, packs the local news each week, has taken on the scale of a national scandal.
What else does one expect when the culprit is a celebrity? Pierre Palmade, 54 years old, has had a long career as a comedian and actor, in the cinema as well as the theatre, where he enjoyed playing fragile characters, a little broken by life; deadpan and offbeat. He is a rather unusual figure in the French showbiz landscape because he has never made a secret of his wounds and fragility. For many years, he has suffered from an addiction to cocaine that brought him into conflict with the law on several occasions. A few years ago, after being married to a woman, he came out as a homosexual. But—a rare occurrence in the entertainment industry—he has always asserted he lived his homosexuality with great difficulty, which has led to harsh criticism from the militant gay community. He has repeatedly stated in the press that his homosexuality “weighed on him,” and that if he “had the choice,” he “would have been straight.” Nevertheless, he has repeatedly made headlines for his risky behaviour—risky homosexual relationships and drug use. The accident is therefore, in a way, the sadly predictable outcome of a personal journey in which risk-taking and the breaking of morals have been all too common.
But the main reason for the public outcry is the nature of the victims. One of them is a young woman of 27 who was expecting her first child, a baby girl, on May 14th. The violence of the accident caused her to lose her child. It is striking to note that the entire press reports on the fact that the young woman “lost her baby” in the tragedy. There is no mention of a ‘foetus,’ and even less of a ‘cluster of cells.’
The Melun public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation on potential charges of “homicide and involuntary injury by a driver under the influence of drugs.” But for there to be a ‘homicide,’ the victim must be a person, in this case, the baby of this young mother.
However, in French law, things are not so simple: the unborn child is not considered a legal person. French courts have repeatedly ruled very clearly on this point: in criminal law, the foetus is not a person. An exception is the case of a motorist who was convicted of homicide of a foetus in 2014. He had hit a pregnant woman and the child died. The legal decision was made because the medical experts had established that the baby was viable and had only died as a result of the shock of the accident.
Today, after the Melun accident, a similar question will arise. An autopsy will have to be performed on the child, delivered in an emergency caesarean section, to determine whether, for a moment, it breathed outside its mother’s body. If so, it will be recognised as viable, and the charge of homicide will be valid.
In 2002, the Court of Cassation already underlined the absurdity of the law applying to these borderline cases: “the non-application of the criminal law to the death of the foetus, even if it occurs a few seconds before delivery, while it will be applicable to the child who dies a few seconds after delivery, leads to inconsistencies and inequities.” Dura lex, sed lex: the traumatised young mother may have a painful experience if the medical verdict concludes that her child did not breathe.
As the Catholic blog Le Salon Beige writes,
Pierre Palmade and the other victims of the accident thus find themselves, in spite of themselves, at the heart of a controversy that has animated criminal law for the past 25 years, that of knowing whether killing a child in the womb can be considered homicide.
Common sense or the immediate feeling of opinion in the case of this terrible tragedy cries out the obvious: yes, the child is a being in its own right while still in the womb. But unfortunately, everything is organised today, in France as in many other countries, to consider the child as not having its own existence until it is born. To go back on this axiom would mean that the promoters of the culture of death would run the risk of calling into question the whole edifice that allows the legalisation of abortion.
Such legal games must be resolved, especially for the mothers who lose their children to such acts of violence.
Homicide or Not? Unborn Baby Killed in Road Accident Reopens the Debate
A terrible road accident on Friday, February 10th, shook French opinion violently. It involved an actor and comedian well-known to the French public, a certain Pierre Palmade, who, under the influence of cocaine and prescription drugs, violently hit a car carrying a young woman who was almost seven months pregnant, her brother-in-law, and her brother’s six-year-old son. The young woman, still in serious condition like her companions, lost her baby in the accident, which has reopened the debate on the legal status of the foetus in France.
The accident occurred near Melun in Seine-et-Marne, a department southeast of Paris, where the actor has a residence. The investigation revealed that the comedian had been locked up in his house for more than 24 hours with escorts, for a ‘party’ consisting of a lot of cocaine and prescription drugs, against the background of ‘chemsex,’ i.e., the practice of sexual activities stimulated by drugs. In the late afternoon of Friday, February 10th, he went out on an errand in his car, unfit to drive, thus committing the irreparable crime. He lost control of his vehicle and collided head-on with a car approaching in the opposite lane. At the wheel was a forty-year-old man, who was driving his pregnant sister-in-law and his own six-year-old son. Two passengers in Pierre Palmade’s car—escort boys—fled at the time of the accident, adding to the sordidness of the affair. They have since been found by the police.
Today, the comedian is alive and he can now be questioned by the police. He has been taken into custody. The young woman, who is now also out of danger, should be able to leave the hospital in the next few days. However, the driver and his son are still in serious condition. The family’s lawyer also revealed that the boy was “disfigured.”
What could be a banal news item of the kind that, unfortunately, packs the local news each week, has taken on the scale of a national scandal.
What else does one expect when the culprit is a celebrity? Pierre Palmade, 54 years old, has had a long career as a comedian and actor, in the cinema as well as the theatre, where he enjoyed playing fragile characters, a little broken by life; deadpan and offbeat. He is a rather unusual figure in the French showbiz landscape because he has never made a secret of his wounds and fragility. For many years, he has suffered from an addiction to cocaine that brought him into conflict with the law on several occasions. A few years ago, after being married to a woman, he came out as a homosexual. But—a rare occurrence in the entertainment industry—he has always asserted he lived his homosexuality with great difficulty, which has led to harsh criticism from the militant gay community. He has repeatedly stated in the press that his homosexuality “weighed on him,” and that if he “had the choice,” he “would have been straight.” Nevertheless, he has repeatedly made headlines for his risky behaviour—risky homosexual relationships and drug use. The accident is therefore, in a way, the sadly predictable outcome of a personal journey in which risk-taking and the breaking of morals have been all too common.
But the main reason for the public outcry is the nature of the victims. One of them is a young woman of 27 who was expecting her first child, a baby girl, on May 14th. The violence of the accident caused her to lose her child. It is striking to note that the entire press reports on the fact that the young woman “lost her baby” in the tragedy. There is no mention of a ‘foetus,’ and even less of a ‘cluster of cells.’
The Melun public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation on potential charges of “homicide and involuntary injury by a driver under the influence of drugs.” But for there to be a ‘homicide,’ the victim must be a person, in this case, the baby of this young mother.
However, in French law, things are not so simple: the unborn child is not considered a legal person. French courts have repeatedly ruled very clearly on this point: in criminal law, the foetus is not a person. An exception is the case of a motorist who was convicted of homicide of a foetus in 2014. He had hit a pregnant woman and the child died. The legal decision was made because the medical experts had established that the baby was viable and had only died as a result of the shock of the accident.
Today, after the Melun accident, a similar question will arise. An autopsy will have to be performed on the child, delivered in an emergency caesarean section, to determine whether, for a moment, it breathed outside its mother’s body. If so, it will be recognised as viable, and the charge of homicide will be valid.
In 2002, the Court of Cassation already underlined the absurdity of the law applying to these borderline cases: “the non-application of the criminal law to the death of the foetus, even if it occurs a few seconds before delivery, while it will be applicable to the child who dies a few seconds after delivery, leads to inconsistencies and inequities.” Dura lex, sed lex: the traumatised young mother may have a painful experience if the medical verdict concludes that her child did not breathe.
As the Catholic blog Le Salon Beige writes,
Common sense or the immediate feeling of opinion in the case of this terrible tragedy cries out the obvious: yes, the child is a being in its own right while still in the womb. But unfortunately, everything is organised today, in France as in many other countries, to consider the child as not having its own existence until it is born. To go back on this axiom would mean that the promoters of the culture of death would run the risk of calling into question the whole edifice that allows the legalisation of abortion.
Such legal games must be resolved, especially for the mothers who lose their children to such acts of violence.
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