From Monday May 27, the French National Assembly will examine a bill on the end of life, providing for the first time in France a “assisted dying” for certain patients, not without raising concerns and divisions.
This highly sensitive text must constitute the major societal reform of President Emmanuel Macron’s second five-year term. The government’s project proposes a “help to die“which allows certain patients, according to”strict conditions“, to receive a “lethal substance”.
Among these conditions is the fact of being affected by a “serious and incurable condition with a life-threatening prognosis in the short or medium term“, be of age, able to express one’s will in a free and informed manner, and present suffering that is refractory to treatment or unbearable. The Minister of Health Catherine Vautrin has never stopped praising a “balanced text”.
Debates in the parliamentary committee, however, led last week to the modification of several key points, endangering this fragile balance according to many voices.
The mention of “vital prognosis committed in the short or medium term” was replaced by the notion of affection “in advanced or terminal phase”what “expands” according to an MP the number of potential beneficiaries.
Other matters of alarm
The change was welcomed by the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, which campaigns for the legalization of euthanasia. Another amendment raises concern because it allows the patient to specify the “type of support for assisted dying” desired in the event that he loses “consciousness irreversibly.
Elsewhere in the text, the criterion that the patient must be “capable of expressing one’s will in a free and informed manner.” is maintained.
Third subject of alarm, the question of the administration of the lethal substance. The text provided that patients should administer it themselves, unless they were unable to do so. But an amendment gave patients the possibility of freely choosing to delegate this action to a third party.
These changes increased the hostility of opponents of the bill. The Catholic Church and the Protestant Federation of France deplored them, and a group of healthcare organizations estimated that “Pandora’s box (was) open”.
Another part of the text concerns palliative care, which MPs from all benches want to see strengthened. Even if the left and the presidential camp should provide most of the support for the bill, faced with the hostility dominating the right and the extreme right, the parliamentary debates will not be reduced to traditional divisions, voices against -current expressed in the different groups.
The bill is expected to continue its legislative journey until at least the summer of 2025, providing the opportunity for multiple adjustments.
