2024-05-01 17:56:39
The special commission on the end of life at the National Assembly, in Paris, April 22, 2024. JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP
They threw all their arguments into battle. Doctors, caregivers, nurses, pharmacists, volunteers, directors nursing homes, philosophers, jurists, sociologists, representatives of religions or Masonic lodges: there were 79 speakers invited to give their opinion, from Monday April 22 to Tuesday April 30, to the National Assembly on the bill relating to the support for the sick and the end of life before its examination by the deputies in session from May 27.
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For more than thirty-five hours, they were heard before the special commission made up of 71 deputies appointed by their political groups to examine the text of the law. This provides for the opening of access to “assisted dying” to incurable patients with refractory or unbearable suffering and whose vital prognosis is compromised in the short or medium term.
For this grand oral at the Palais-Bourbon, the speakers were selected by the president of the special commission, Agnès Firmin Le Bodo, MP (Horizons) for Seine-Maritime and linchpin of the bill when she was Minister of Health in the government of Elisabeth Borne.
The Le Havre MP composed the program for the hearings in conjunction with the office of the special committee, made up of representatives of all political groups in the Assembly, and in conjunction with the general rapporteur of the bill, Olivier Falorni, MP ( Democrats and independent) of Charente-Maritime. This special commission – an unusual format for a legal text – aims to acculturate deputies to a subject for which the parliamentary groups will not give voting instructions.
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Most of the people interviewed stressed the need to change the text, either because the conditions for access to “assisted dying” seem too restrictive to them, or because they seem difficult to apply.
“Never, never, never euthanasia”
First observation: most of the representatives of the medical world interviewed did not question the establishment of “assisted dying”. Neither the National Order of Physicians nor the National Academy of Medicine have expressed their opposition to the principle of changing the legal framework.
The strongest protest came from three of the four palliative care practitioners who spoke. “Do not legalize euthanasia, even exceptional! “, urged Doctor Claire Fourcade, president of the French Society for Support and Palliative Care (SFAP). Citing the results of an online questionnaire released in March by the SFAP, to which nearly 3,000 palliative care practitioners responded, she said that more than three-quarters of respondents said they would refuse to prescribe and administer a lethal product to their patients.
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