The medical option will only be provided to adults, except those with psychiatric conditions and disorders like Alzeihmer’s
After adding abortion as a right in its Constitution last week, France has stirred up the global choice vs life debate with yet another policy consideration. President Emmanuel Macron told newspapers March 10, 2024 that from May, the French Parliament will be discussing provisions for legalising assisted dying.
The bill, which will have strict conditions, will be for people with incurable illnesses that will kill them in the “short- or middle-term”, Macron said. They can be prescribed a lethal medication which they can administer on their own or appoint a person of their choice or a medical professional to do it, the President told the press in an interview.
It will help stop end-of-life suffering for such patients, he added.
The medical option will only be provided to adults, except those with psychiatric conditions and disorders like Alzeihmer’s.
If the bill is cleared, France will join European countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Switzerland and Portugal, where euthanasia or assisted suicide is allowed. Germany has been negotiating such a law for the last couple of years.
Most of Australia, some states of the United States and Japan also have made such practices legal.
Macron noted that some patients afflicted with terminal diseases who go through “inhuman” pain, often travel to other countries where assisted dying is legal to put an end to their sufferings.
“He wanted to avoid the terms assisted suicide or euthanasia because the patient’s consent is essential, with a role for medical opinion and ‘precise criteria’,” according to the French news publication Le Monde.
A patient wishing to end their life will be asked to reconfirm their choice within 48 hours, following which, a medical team will discuss the particular case and give a verdict within two weeks.
The country already allows passive euthanasia, where a patient can exercise their ‘right to die’ by choosing to remove life support and be put on continuous and deep sedation.
“With this Bill, we are facing up to death,” the French news agency AFP, quoted Macron as saying.
The President’s statement has been met with criticism from a section of the healthcare community, who said the government is doing this to save money that should have instead be pumped into strengthening palliative care so that the terminally ill can die with dignity. It will hurt “the care relationship”, associations for palliative care, cancer support and specialist nurses wrote in a statement, according to AFP.
France’s Catholic church also opposed the bill. “A law like this, whatever its aim, will bend our whole health system towards death as a solution,” the French Catholic news daily La Croix quoted the bishops’ conference chief Eric de Moulins-Beaufort as saying.
Assisted dying was one of Macron’s presidential campaign promises. Apart from allowing the practice, the President also said his government will allocate a billion euros to improve palliative care in the country, reported AFP.
European parliamentary elections begin in June this year and France will elect the second-highest number of members among European Union countries.
According to global news agency Reuters, Macron has been actively restructuring his governance policies to adopt a more socialist outlook, with his party trailing behind Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National in pre-election surveys.
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