2024-03-12 11:00:10
Few subjects, as much as that of the “end of life”, combine intimate convictions, lived experience and the responsibility of the community to this extent. However, if the possibility of medical help to shorten an untenable life opens up dizzying questions for everyone, without exception, and calls for complex answers, it spectacularly brings together 90% of favorable opinions among the French. Emmanuel Macron, unlike his predecessor, had the courage to open the debate on an almost unanimously desired change in legislation.
The Claeys-Leonetti law of 2016, which authorizes “deep and continuous sedation until death” for patients in great pain, whose vital prognosis is at risk in the short term, although it represented progress, it does not respond to all situations or all requests. It is not acceptable that patients in distress are forced to leave for Switzerland or Belgium, or to order products of uncertain composition online. While the freedom to resort to abortion has just been enshrined in the Constitution, it is time for the law to recognize the freedom to choose one’s death when the conditions for a dignified and bearable life are no longer met.
In September 2022, the opinion of the National Consultative Ethics Committee admitting, to “strict” conditions, “the possibility of legal access to assisted suicide”, had opened the way for a citizens’ convention on the subject. In April 2023, at the end of intense debates, 184 citizens of all sensibilities spoke out in majority, without masking their differences, in favor of“an opening to active assistance in dying”. This means that the President of the Republic has a solid basis for announcing, as he has just done in The cross et Releasethe tabling, in April, of a bill on“assisted dying” which he presents as a text “of gathering and fraternity”.
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By attaching access to this “help” to stricter conditions than those recommended by the citizens’ convention – ban on minors, capacity of discernment of the patient, vital prognosis, collegial decision of a medical team, period of reflection –, Emmanuel Macron removes the worst pitfall: that which would have consisted of encouraging the poorest to choose to disappear for fear of weighing on society or on their family. But the text presented does not avoid all criticism. The procedure appears complex and the definition of “vital prognosis engaged in the short or medium term » uncertain.
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