HASAt a time when voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) becomes a freedom engraved in the Constitution, what will be the content of the bill announced this Sunday March 10 by President Emmanuel Macron, in his joint interview with the newspapers The cross and to Release, faced with the variety of end-of-life situations? Right long awaited by patients who refuse suffering “worse than death”as the philosopher Fréderic Worms said in an article in The Obs from December 8, 2022and who ask ” turn off the light “ ?
Polls have consistently shown this for years: the French are in favor of a new law which would recognize their right to be medically helped to shorten their lives.
It has been almost a year since, at the end of in-depth, respectful work praised for its exceptional quality, the citizens’ convention on the end of life declared itself in favor of the recognition of a right for a person suffering from an incurable illness and of unrelieved suffering to receive assisted suicide or to benefit from medical assistance in dying, upon his express and repeated request, within a legal framework.
The forces which oppose the recognition of this new right today are reminiscent of those which, fifty years ago, opposed abortion. With similar arguments.
Not the same listening
The religious authorities, in the first place, who, in the name of the idea according to which “life is sacred”, have weighed with all their strength against the Veil law, adopted in 1975. In recent months, they have laid siege to the government and President Emmanuel Macron, who invited them several times to hear their arguments. Associations which campaign for the recognition of this new right and receive people in distress are not entitled to the same attention.
Then the medical authorities – the council of the order of doctors and the National Academy of Medicine – who, brandishing the Hippocratic oath and in the name of the principle “thou shalt not kill”, were fiercely opposed to abortion. Fortunately, doctors defying the ban came to the aid of women, just as some today come to the aid of their condemned and suffering patients who ask for their help to leave peacefully without waiting for an implacable outcome. Just like their predecessors before 1975, these doctors continue to be brought to justice.
However, the position of certain important institutions is beginning to change, such as the National Academy of Medicine, which recently supported the idea of a right to “assisted suicide”, or the Advisory Committee national ethics opening the door to an exception for euthanasia. They note that, even if it were generalized throughout France, which we can only hope, palliative care does not respond to all situations; just as contraception, although free and free, does not respond to all the situations women face.
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