Euthanasia: Progressive Victory in Sight as the Right Abandons the Battlefield

The controversial French euthanasia bill was passed by the National Assembly in May 2025 and is currently being reviewed by the Senate. Despite being considered more conservative, the Senate has unexpectedly decided to dramatically speed up the debate. Two bills are currently on the table: one on euthanasia and active assistance in dying, and the other on the development of palliative care. In a shake-up of the schedule, the Senate has chosen to examine the first bill first for reasons of ‘priority,’ counting on the mobilisation of senators, while the second bill is unlikely to interest parliamentarians who will be eager to return to their constituencies in the run-up to the next municipal elections.

Anxiety is mounting among pro-life advocates at the prospect of the bill being definitively adopted. Its content would make France one of the most permissive countries in the world.

The March for Life demonstration, organised in Paris on Sunday, January 18th, highlighted the semantic fraud behind the bill: the text describes euthanasia and assisted suicide as “care,” creating an obligation for doctors, with terms deliberately chosen to mask the purpose of the act, which is to deliberately cause death.

Concern also comes from those affected by assisted dying, who are not only people at the end of their lives. People who still have several years to live could be “eligible.” Under these conditions, people with disabilities or in a state of psychological distress fear being pushed towards death as the first therapeutic ‘choice.’ In Ouest-France, Jeanne-Emmanuelle Hutin reports the words of Dr Magali Jeanteur, founder of “Les Éligibles”, speaking on behalf of people with disabilities: 

This law is very violent for us. It puts us in danger. Our lives are difficult. There are days when we may be tempted to give up. If, on those days, help to die is easier than help to live, we fear that many of us will be tempted to end our lives.

This concern is not limited to the right wing. The Left Front party has taken note of the risks of abuse: “If the law is definitively adopted, requesting death through access to assisted dying will become the simplest and quickest option available to people with disabilities.”

The decision-making process has serious control flaws, giving excessive power to doctors, with no real counterbalance and no possibility of legal recourse. Discernment is treated with worrying levity, as evidenced by the very short deadlines for both decision-making and reflection. As the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) explains, “euthanasia could be carried out within a week, without the patient having received complete information before confirming their request.”

Healthcare institutions run by religious communities fear being forced to perform euthanasia in defiance of their faith and centuries of service. “We have been caring for the sick and suffering for centuries, and tomorrow they are going to put us in prison! It breaks our hearts,” Sister Marie-Foucauld, a nun with the Little Sisters of Catholic Maternity Hospitals, told the newspaper La Croix. She also spoke before members of the National Assembly and the Senate. The future law provides, on the model of what exists for abortion, for an ‘offence of obstruction,’ punishable by two years in prison and a €30,000 fine, sanctioning “the act of preventing or attempting to prevent the practice of or obtaining information about assisted dying.” 

The offence of obstruction is a specifically French phenomenon, as Grégor Puppinck, director of the ECLJ, pointed out a few weeks ago in La Croix. In the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States, institutions cannot be coerced or financially penalised. Even in Belgium and Canada, where very permissive legislation requires institutions to perform euthanasia, there is no offence of obstruction punishable by imprisonment. Senators have removed this provision, but it could be reinstated during the final review of the text in the National Assembly. 

Religious communities are alarmed by the absence of a conscience clause for non-medical staff in health and medical-social establishments. Some congregations may even have to close their establishments if their medical ethics, in accordance with their Christian faith, are not respected.

If the law is passed, it could simply spell the end of Christian involvement in the field of care and health—even though for centuries in France, it has been the Church and the Church alone that has provided care for the elderly and the sick. The Catholic Church’s position on this issue is very clear. In 2020, Pope Francis declared that laws approving euthanasia “entail a grave and specific obligation to oppose them through conscientious objection.” On the subject of institutions faced with euthanasia, he added that “it is not ethically acceptable to have institutional collaboration with other hospitals to refer and direct people who request euthanasia.” In Belgium, some institutions have been denied the designation ‘Catholic’ because they practised euthanasia.

Numerous amendments have been introduced in the hope that senators will take action on this serious and sensitive issue. However, the turn that the debates in the upper house are taking is not reassuring at this stage. The Senate is due to vote on January 28th, before a final review by the National Assembly in February.

The current debate on euthanasia reveals a dramatic dilution of the conservative position on social issues within the various factions of the French Right. The defence of the dignity of life is no longer taking place in the chamber, but in the streets, and the main right-wing parties—whether the Rassemblement National or Les Républicains—have abandoned the battlefield, apparently without too much regret.