Tribune. The recent abandonment of the “great age and autonomy” bill, on which the elderly with loss of autonomy and their families, health professionals, associations and actors engaged in improving their living conditions firmly relied. life, is a shock. It is not the recent announcements of Jean Castex (10,000 additional positions in the old age sector within five years) nor the floor price to better remunerate home interventions that can reassure them. Ten times more hires would be needed to ensure the dignity of the end of life of our seniors.
If we compare this abandonment, the reasons for which remain opaque, to the current movement in favor of a law on the right to die with dignity, relaunched by the film Everything went well by François Ozon, the shock is even more powerful. Because it is the very sign of the nauseating ageism of our society. How can we explain that three Presidents of the Republic have made a firm commitment to this old age law and that this promise has not been kept three times in a row?
What, in the unconscious of our decision-makers, explains these broken promises, if not the rampant ageism which ultimately aims to exclude the old and the old from their political, budgetary, and even societal trade-offs.
Paradoxical consequences of ageism
I will be objected to the fact that since the beginning of the health crisis we have “sacrificed” the economy of our country, work and the well-being of young people to protect the elderly, and that health decisions have had to. firstly as the objective of preventing a disaster in nursing homes. A laudable objective, certainly, because, in view of the collective guilt towards isolated and vulnerable elderly, our leaders could not afford to accept a tsunami of death among our elders. We were marked by the heatwave of 2003. We therefore protected our old people, but we made them desperate. As I denounced in my book The Forbidden Farewell (Plon, 2020), many of them, deprived of what gave them the desire to live, let themselves die in the greatest indignity. Because what could be more unworthy than to die alone, without a farewell, without the face, the words, the presence of a loved one?
The fact that, in the midst of a pandemic, several bills for medical assistance in dying were discussed as an emergency in Parliament should question us. Are we not facing one of the paradoxical consequences of ageism that I am denouncing here? It is paradoxical, indeed, to present to the French a law to die with dignity by lethal injection, at a time when more than 100,000 families are living the pangs of mourning impossible to do, since their loved one has been deprived of the right. imprescriptible to accompaniment, to the exchange of farewells, to human presence, at the time of death.
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