HASAccompanying the person to allow them to live among us the final times of their existence is to show them a recognition which preserves their feeling of belonging to the human community. It means mobilizing our solidarity and the necessary skills to protect against any form of suffering or indignity. Support means resisting with her and her loved ones the temptation of early renunciation, neglect and mistreatment, mentalities of abandonment, or consent to death given out of compassion.
Accompanying a person will never shorten their life. The State or the legislator will not change anything, including by making a mistake through a misused use of the meaning of the terms that they want to impose as if it were a question of reassuring us in the bill relating to support the sick and the end of life. THE “supportive care”THE “patients’ rights” do not have medical assistance in dying as an option. Palliative care is neither the guarantee nor the alternative to lethal act protocols. Establishing this observation means clarifying the ethical and deontological rupture that the law will legitimize.
Since the 1980s, the philosophy of support and caring commitment has been implemented in dialogue with the person by professionals and members of associations working in palliative care. They rehabilitated the “humanist care” in a context where hospital medicine, powerless to cure, absolved itself of its duties towards the person left behind when they died or to whom a “lytic cocktail” was administered for their ” deliverance.”
Palliative care has launched in our country a culture of support which reconciles concern for the person, for their fundamental rights, with the requirement for attentive relational care. Attuning to one’s needs is a form of human assistance which gives care a meaning of which no serious reasoning would authorize the slightest community of thought with the practices of medically assisted suicide or euthanasia.
Legalized medical homicide
In health or medico-social establishments, and also at home, palliative care expertise has developed on the fringes of conventional practices, reluctant to approach the sick person in their decision-making autonomy beyond their illness. “Health democracy”, established in the law of March 4, 2002 relating to the rights of patients and the quality of the health system, is part of this vision of a renewal of the ethics of care concerned with recognizing person a dignity that no consideration can flout.
You have 57.72% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.