2023-07-26 07:10:38
This April 20, at the Elysée Palace, Brigitte Macron receives lunch. Among the guests, Claire Fourcade, president of the French Society for Support and Palliative Care (SFAP), took her place at the table. “My husband might not be there, regrets the wife of the head of state. But he left me a few questions. » Mme Macron especially wants to know the position of caregivers in the debate on the end of life. If he plans to present “by the end of summer” a bill on active assistance in dying, Emmanuel Macron wants to avoid antagonizing caregivers, most of whom are hostile to the idea that “to kill” can be likened to ” a care “according to the SFAP formula.
In charge of drawing up the bill, Agnès Firmin Le Bodo led meetings with parliamentarians until July 20 to, she says, “to co-construct” the text. The minister delegate in charge of territorial organization and the health professions brought together a circle of caregiver representatives. Among them, only a minority was in favor of active assistance in dying. At the end of this work, the Minister assures her interlocutors today that she is preparing a text ” moderate “, proper to avoid “to fracture the caregivers”.
According to our information, the bill under study at the ministry envisages a right to assisted suicide, i.e. the possibility of requesting the prescription of a lethal product, at the end of a very supervised procedure. It would be open only to adults, suffering from an incurable disease and whose vital prognosis is committed in the medium term (six to twelve months). In addition, they should be able to express their request directly and to reiterate it.
A “dreadful arbitration for Macron”
Meetings with parliamentarians and caregivers will resume on September 6 and 7. By then, the Elysée will have looked at the minister’s copy and will have to resolve a dilemma: for patients who are not in a condition to end their lives themselves, should the future law provide the intervention of a third party to carry out the lethal gesture?
The way was opened by the National Consultative Ethics Committee (CCNE), in its opinion issued on September 13, 2022: “Leaving outside the scope of the law those who are no longer physically fit for such a gesture, writes the CCNE, would raise a problem of the equality of citizens which constitutes in itself a major ethical difficulty. “As soon as it is not the patient who performs the final gesture, we enter the legal field of euthanasia, which supposes modifying the penal code”recalls François Stasse, former State Councilor and member of CCNE.
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