FRANCE – Proposed end-of-life bill cancelled: back to square one
07 August 2024
On the evening of 9 June 2024, after his allies suffered a heavy defeat in the European elections, French President Emmanuel Macron unexpectedly announced the immediate dissolution of the Assemblée and called new parliamentary elections. This decision was a heavy blow for the proponents of assisted dying: all bills currently being discussed were automatically cancelled, including the long-announced “Projet de loi relatif à l’accompagnement des malades et de la fin de vie”, which, after many years of careful preparation, had finally been on the Assemblée’s agenda at that very moment. The first few law articles had already been discussed and approved and the final vote had been due to take place on 18 June 2024.
The supporting delegates and everyone else who had been involved in the long preparations were and are heavily disappointed about this “collateral damage” of the French president’s power-politics decision. Although Macron confirmed that he wants to put the topic back on the agenda as soon as possible, the current political situation in France makes this rather unlikely.
Of course, the ones hit particularly hard by this unexpected turn of events are the country’s citizens, whose desire for self-determination regarding their own end of lives continues to be what it has been for a long time: wishful thinking. Although the draft law contained some points that are not really liberal in terms of real freedom of choice, the law would have been an important stepping stone. It would have given large sections of the population the option not only to decide how and when their suffering and life would end, but also to have access to legal and safe professional help for this in their own country, if they so wished.
Thus, for the time being, everything remains as it was: seriously ill persons in France who wish to end their own suffering and life are either forced to recur to risky or illegal “do-it-yourself” suicide methods, or to initiate the challenging and strenuous process of preparing to travel to Switzerland to be able to die safely and peacefully, far away from home.
