After several months of procrastination, French President Emmanuel Macron accelerated legislative changes designed to authorise euthanasia and assisted suicide in France. He unveiled his plan—due to be presented to parliament and voted on by May—to the press on Sunday, March 10th. After enshrining abortion in the constitution, he is once again deliberately opting for a culture of death.
In a double interview, published by both the Christian newspaper La Croix and the left-wing newspaper Libération, Emmanuel Macron outlined the contours of his long-awaited bill on “aid in dying.” The project has been in the pipeline for many months, since reforming the legislation on ‘active aid in dying’ was one of his campaign promises for his election in 2022. Until now, the president has given the impression of hesitating when it came to taking action.
Causing considerable concern in French medical circles, the content of the proposed law goes very far in the direction pushed by the pro-euthanasia lobby. Long an admirer of the “Belgian model” for euthanasia, President Macron intends to propose a “French model for the end of life,” which he claims is made up of “togetherness” and “fraternity.”
French law, as defined in 2016, provided for “deep and continuous sedation” in the event of intolerable suffering and an inability to reverse a seriously compromised vital prognosis. From now on, it will be possible, in Macron’s words, to “request aid in dying under certain strict conditions.”
The French president welcomes the existence of safeguards—but it is legitimate to wonder whether they will be respected. Assisted dying will only apply to people who are old enough to consent, “capable of full and complete discernment”—which excludes, for example, psychiatric patients or those suffering from Alzheimer’s—suffering from an “incurable” pathology with “a short or medium-term life-threatening prognosis,” and undergoing “intractable” suffering that cannot be relieved.
The decision will then be subject to a collegiate medical opinion. If the opinion is positive, the patient will be prescribed a lethal substance, which he will be able to administer himself or with the help of a third party—a doctor or relative—if unable to do so, within a period of three months, during which he will be able to reverse the decision at any time. The procedure could be carried out in a care establishment, at home, or in nursing homes for the elderly.
All the criteria have therefore been met to legitimise assisted suicide, but Macron vigorously refutes the use of this term or that of euthanasia, pointing out that consent is essential and that the act is medically supervised according to “precise criteria.”
When the content of the forthcoming law was announced, many healthcare associations expressed alarm at what they considered to be an extremely dangerous proposal. In a press release dated March 11th, a group of caregivers expressed their “anger, dismay and sadness” at the content of the presidential announcements. They denounced the conditions in which the text was drawn up, since, despite Macron’s promotion of a “democratic process,” carers have not been consulted for several months. The text was drafted without them, as evidenced by the speed with which the law is due to be presented to parliament.
The associations are particularly concerned about the extremely permissive nature of the forthcoming law, despite the assurances given by the head of state. All the abuses observed in other countries are already in the pipeline. On one particular point, France is inviting an extremely dangerous scenario, by authorising the administration of the lethal substance by someone close to the patient, which is not done anywhere else in the world, and is potentially a source of extremely serious abuses.
The bill should include a whole section on palliative care, but patient support associations are extremely sceptical because experience abroad proves that the palliative mentality and euthanasia are fundamentally incompatible. The promised increase in the budget for palliative care is derisory given the needs of this sector. Finally, the geriatric sector is particularly concerned about the elderly, who will obviously be the first to be affected by the new law. The government had promised, with a great deal of publicity, an “Old Age Act” designed to provide support for the elderly and vulnerable. This law is unlikely to see the light of day and has been ‘replaced’ by a law that inexorably pushes elderly and dependent people towards a clinically authorised death.
Macron’s announcement on assisted dying comes just two days after the right to abortion was enshrined in the French constitution, confirmed on Women’s Day on Friday, March 8th. The concomitance of these two events is a stark reminder of the government’s progressive headlong rush— unable to tackle the structural problems of French society and economy— towards a mortifying plan.
Macron chose the Christian newspaper La Croix to set out his vision for euthanasia. France’s bishops took the floor to denounce the president’s hypocrisy and his failure to listen to religious authorities. Msgr. Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of the French Bishops’ Conference, also spoke out in La Croix following the President’s interview, denouncing the President’s unhealthy rhetorical skill in dressing up a resolutely mortifying choice in terms of “fraternity:”
We, the bishops, ask that society help people to live and to live to the end, until death. What helps people to die in a fully human way is not a lethal product, but affection, consideration, and attention.
Msgr. de Moulins-Beaufort also points out that the safeguards sought by the president are in no way a guarantee, as the debate will take place in the National Assembly and the Senate, and members of parliament are quite capable of overstepping the so-called red lines set by Emmanuel Macron. It is also revealing that at no point did the president mention the existence of a specific conscience clause for those who will be responsible for giving death—a point that reveals the current mentality, and which is already at the heart of the debate on abortion.
The archbishop concluded by saying:
It is worthwhile for Catholics to encourage their parliamentarians not to be carried away by emotions or by the fear of being called conservative. It is false progress to offer death as a solution.
Interviewed on France Info on the morning of Monday, March 11th, the Bishop of Nanterre and former chaplain to members of parliament Msgr. Matthieu Rougé had some very harsh words to castigate the social project of Emmanuel Macron and his supporters. Echoing a slogan dear to the President of the Republic (“France has to become a start-up nation”), he exclaimed: “We have the impression that in the start-up nation, non-productive people no longer have a right to be here.”
Msgr. Rougé is particularly concerned about the possibility of assisted suicide in nursing homes for the dependent elderly (EHPAD, for établissement d’hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes.) These are regularly denounced as places where inhumane abuses are committed during the care of suffering people, and the proposed law would only exacerbate the trend.
The bill will be presented to the Council of Ministers in April for a first reading in the National Assembly in May. The parliamentary process leading up to the final adoption of the law is expected to take until 2025.
If the law ends up being passed in terms similar to those desired by the president, France will once again be seen as a sinister vehicle for the most destructive instincts of a Western society in perdition.
