The French Senate once again blocked this week the bill promoted by Emmanuel Macron’s Government to introduce assisted suicide and euthanasia in France, amid growing political, medical, and religious opposition that denounces the serious moral and anthropological change that normalizing the deliberate elimination of the sick and elderly would entail.
The upper house of the French parliament rejected for the second time the core of the law, highlighting the deep division that exists in France over an initiative presented by its supporters as an expansion of rights, but considered by its opponents as a dangerous break with the basic principles of protecting human life.
The Senate rejects the heart of the law
On Monday evening, the senators voted against the main article of the bill, the one that established the supposed “right” to assisted suicide. The measure was rejected by 151 votes to 118, causing the text to fall in the upper house.
However, the Senate did approve another section aimed at strengthening palliative care, with 325 votes in favor and 18 against. The decision reflected the position of many senators who consider that the answer to suffering should not be to cause the death of the patient, but to guarantee adequate medical and human care until the end of life.
Until now, the project has accumulated two approvals in the National Assembly—the lower house of the French parliament—and two rejections in the Senate, which has a more conservative and centrist composition.
Macron wants to push the law through before summer
The French Government intends to definitively approve the law before the parliamentary recess in July. To achieve this, it could grant the final decision to the National Assembly, where the text has more support.
However, the conservative opposition is demanding that an issue of such moral significance be submitted directly to a popular vote. The leader of the Republicans party (LR), Bruno Retailleau, called for a referendum, considering it a “grave anthropological question.”
“A text so fundamental must benefit from a minimum of consensus,” declared the conservative leader, who also warned of the climate of pressure that this type of legislation can generate on the elderly, the sick, and vulnerable people.
Retailleau warned that many people could end up wondering if they are not “a burden” for their families or for society, one of the arguments most repeated by those who oppose euthanasia in Europe.
Growing fear of a drift against the weakest
Senator Francis Szpiner, also a member of the Republicans and opposed to the law, claimed to have gathered more than 195 parliamentary signatures to attempt to promote a shared-initiative referendum procedure.
The project would allow people with terminal or incurable diseases to request lethal medication to end their lives. Although in principle the patient should administer it themselves, the law provides that a healthcare professional can do it when the patient is unable to do so.
Currently, the text establishes five requirements: being of legal age, giving free and informed consent, suffering from an incurable disease with a compromised life prognosis, experiencing pain resistant to treatments, and residing stably in France to avoid the so-called “death tourism.”
The law also includes conscientious objection for doctors and healthcare workers, although requiring them to refer the patient to another professional willing to perform the procedure.
The Church denounces an “anthropological break”
The French Catholic Church has intensified its opposition to Macron’s project. Days before the parliamentary debate, Bishop Marc Aillet of Bayonne, Lescar, and Oloron sent a letter to his diocese in which he described the initiative as “extremely serious.”
The prelate denounced that the legalization of assisted suicide would entail an “anthropological break” aimed at abolishing the prohibition on killing on which social coexistence has historically been built.
Aillet especially warned of the risk that the poorest, vulnerable, or abandoned patients would run, who could feel pushed toward euthanasia by fear of becoming an economic, familial, or social burden.
Palliative care, a real alternative to euthanasia
The French bishop insisted that the true response to human suffering is not to cause the death of the patient, but to strengthen palliative care, which is still insufficient in France despite the laws approved in the past years.
“Almost all patients tempted by assisted suicide or euthanasia abandon that idea when they receive adequate care in palliative care units,” Aillet said.
The French Episcopal Conference had already defended in January that palliative care constitutes “the only truly effective response” to difficult end-of-life situations.
“Adequate care almost always eliminates requests for death among terminal patients,” the French bishops stated at the time, before summarizing their position with a forceful phrase: “One does not care for life by giving death.”