France could soon legalise euthanasia

Euthanasia for the terminally ill may see reality in France following Emmanuel Macron call for a law “within months” on a “French model on the end of life”.

e president has pledged to table a draft law on the right to die by the “end of summer”, a day after a group of citizens called for legislation to be changed.

President Macron said the bill would build on the work of a group of 184 randomly appointed French citizens – a bit like Ireland’s Citizen Assembly – who have debated the issue since December.

In conclusions handed to Mr Macron the other week, some 76% of the citizen’s council said they favoured allowing patients the right to some form of assistance to die. e group has spent three months tackling the ethical issue amid growing calls to allow medically assisted deaths for terminally ill patients.

Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Spain all allow active euthanasia, where a doctor administers a fatal dose of a drug at the request of a patient to relieve su ering.

Assisted suicide, in which the physician supplies the drug but the patient administers it, is legal in Austria, Switzerland and Italy.

In France, neither practice is legal, prompting dozens of e change has been spurred by the death of JeanLuc Godard, the FrancoSwiss lm director, who last September chose to die by assisted suicide in Switzerland at the age of 91.

French to travel to Switzerland to end their lives.

Mr Macron said he wished to put in place a euthanasia process that would be up to the French parliament to agree on but within certain limits.

He said that any changes would have to “guarantee the expression of free and enlightened desire” to die and the “reiteration of this choice”.

Medically assisted death could only be allowed when a patient su ered from an incurable “psychological and physical” condition, he said.

Mr Macron ruled out assisted death being extended to children and pledged more funds for palliative care so that all French who need it can receive it.

Under legislation known as the Claeys-Leonetti law, doctors are authorised to intervene at the end of life to sedate terminally ill patients deeply until their deaths occur naturally. Such patients also have the right to refuse life-sustaining treatments and can state this preference in advance before they require end-of-life care.

Within a week of Mr Godard’s death, France’s national ethics committee opened a new path for legal change by saying that “under strict conditions”, active assistance in dying was ethically possible. e country’s national council of doctors, l’Ordre des Medecins, has said it opposes involving doctors in helping people kill themselves.

In a new poll in Le Journal du Dimanche, some 76% of French said they were for assisted suicide and 36% said they would personally opt for euthanasia if they had a painful and incurable condition. is is only the second time such a citizen’s council has been used in France, after a similar group was formed to debate how to tackle climate change. But after promising to enact its ndings in full, President Macron was accused of greenwashing when he went back on the pledge. is time, parliament will have the last word.