UA law on the end of life is currently under discussion in France. Very recently, the President of the Republic spoke out in favor of discussing, in the coming weeks, a bill on the end of life including the possibility of access to medical assistance in dying. This possibility of choice may be open under conditions to adults with an incurable illness that is life-threatening in the short or medium term, responsible for intractable pain, and who have full discretion.
Some, to oppose this proposition, invoke the Hippocratic oath, which says: ” I never deliberately provoke death. » If current usage has given the term “deliberately” the idea of intentional action, the root of this word is the verb “deliberate”. To deliberate is to weigh all the elements of a question and to debate, collectively or with oneself, before making a decision. However, deliberation must be precisely at the center of the care relationship. This is an exchange which takes place in a climate of mutual trust and whose essential pivot is the freedom of choice of the person being treated.
We, caregivers, believe that a person with an incurable illness or a serious and incurable condition with physical or psychological pain that is impossible to relieve must be able to resort, if this is their request, to medical assistance in dying as a form of care. ultimate. This choice, made by a person who believes that their life is no longer an existence and requests its interruption, is a decision made in full conscience and must be respected as such.
After collegial discussion
Who are we to judge the intensity of the suffering of the person suffering from an incurable illness when they consider our treatments insufficiently effective and their side effects unbearable? Especially when the latter alter consciousness and full lucidity and lead to the deprivation of the capacity to control oneself? On the contrary, we can make the patient’s words heard.
It is not a question of pitting palliative care, which provides high-quality care to people with an incurable illness with a life-threatening prognosis, against medical assistance in dying. People with an incurable illness and who judge that their existence is intolerable despite our treatments must also have the choice to leave after collegial discussion. Our Belgian medical colleagues, like others, when faced with a request for medical assistance in dying by a person, have long practiced this consultation, where the person is the essential interlocutor in a co-constructed dialogue between caregiver and neat.
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