2024-03-25 06:00:00
Before turning to the issues raised by the “assisted dying” bill, it is worth putting them in their broader context. What do we do with death in our societies? It seems to me that we must face three distinct problems, the third of which has unfortunately taken over and overshadows the other two, which I nevertheless wish to begin by recalling.
First of all, we are societies where there have been many births and we will, in the long term, inevitably have many deaths. This shift poses an unprecedented problem which is not only that of aging: how are we going to manage to die in such large numbers? We can fear a time when humans will die en masse, without being able to benefit from much presence or care. We felt it in the most dramatic weeks of the Covid-19 epidemic, but it can take other forms, such as famine or war. We are not there yet, but we must already learn more modest, more sober ways of dying, as opposed to expensive therapeutic efforts.
Then, we must be aware that no one can take care of themselves alone throughout life. However, this goes once morest our ideal of autonomy and emancipation: where we sought independence, we discover our mutual interdependencies. This issue is aggravated by the aging of the population which increases the proportion of lonely people. The professionalization of care fails to compensate for this “voluntary solitude” in which we have massively placed ourselves.
Also read the column | Article reserved for our End of life subscribers: “The case-by-case imperative is all the greater as the expectations of elderly patients are not always easy to take into account”
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The third problem is that the increase in our technical capabilities has continued to expand the sphere of what we can and must choose. Hence the distressing weight of new responsibilities. The children no longer arrive, we make them arrive. Likewise, death no longer happens and, more and more, we decide when we stop caring.
“Complete blur”
But that, precisely, is the tragedy: the dying person is in hands other than him and depends on what we do with him. This is why we would like standards, legal solutions, to protect us from this anxiety. We see this in the reactions to the bill: the divide in opinion on these questions is all the more profound as it refuses to internalize this tragedy, which no law will silence. The law can simply appease it by installing it in ordinary dissensus. The lawyer Jean Carbonnier wrote: “Between two solutions, always prefer the one which requires the least rights and leaves the most to customs and morality. » What do we expect from the law? The law’s mission is not to provide rules intended to silence our anxieties, but to hear and make complaints heard, even the most discordant, to authorize the conflict of complaints.
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