It was a quiet, almost noiseless adoption of an historic text that has been championed by the Left for more than a decade. On May 27th, MPs in the French Parliament's lower chamber, the National Assembly, voted for a proposed law enshrining the principle of an active right to die, along with an accompanying text on access to palliative care. The latter was passed unanimously by all 560 MPs who voted. The former, establishing assisted dying, was adopted by a large majority of 305 in favour, 199 against.
One must grasp the scale of this legislation – or rather, these two texts, as they are necessarily bound together – which has been carefully balanced.
It is true that the bill's passage through Parliament remains uncertain: the Senate, dominated by the Right, may not be in any rush to place it on its legislative agenda, and the law might not be definitively passed before the end of Emmanuel Macron’s term, theoretically in 2027. The president has even raised the idea of a referendum to secure its adoption before he leaves office.
We should however be hopeful: for this law, shaped over many months, is a cause for celebration for at least three reasons.
A victory for democracy
First and foremost, this text is the result of lengthy political and parliamentary work, driven by civil society and the main parties of the Left, and then steered through by MPs, chief among them centrist MP Olivier Falorni.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
It was also enriched by countless hearings and reports that have converged on the issue, from the work of professor of medicine Didier Sicard which was submitted to François Hollande in 2012, to the more recent opinion produced by the Académie Nationale de Médecine.
President Macron even convened a citizens’ convention, which presented its findings in April 2023. “At the end of intense and respectful debates, a majority of the citizens’ convention backed active assistance in dying (75.6% of those voting),” its final report stated.
Parliamentary deliberation on the issue was also respected: unlike with many other texts (from the recently circumvented Duplomb bill on agriculture and the use of pesticides to recent budgets pushed through using guillotine procedures under article 49-3 of the French Constitution), the government here allowed MPs and senators to do their work properly, rejecting any fast-track procedures. The freedom of parliamentary groups to vote as they saw fit also added to the quality of the debate.
For all these reasons, this law on assisted dying is a cause for satisfaction on democratic grounds.
A secular law
It is also to be welcomed from a secular point of view. The way that laicity is so often twisted to target Muslims can make us forget its liberating power: since the 19th century, France has passed many laws that have allowed the Republic to break with religious dogma. Over and above the 1905 law on church-state separation, there have been laws on public education (1882), divorce (1792, repealed in 1816, reinstated in 1884), freedom over funerals (1887), abortion (1975) and same-sex marriage (2013).
These are laws that “free civil law from religious norms while, at the same time, respecting them by not forcing anyone”, as historian Jean Baubérot, a noted authority on laicity, has tirelessly reminded us. Indeed, these new secular freedoms are not - thankfully! - compulsory. They take nothing from those who object to them.
All these laws were opposed by the various faiths - Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist. On the issue of end of life, they signed a joint appeal condemning what they call an “ethical, social and medical step backwards”. The Catholic Church has denounced the “dangers of an anthropological breach” (language familiar from 'La Manif pour tous' protests against same-sex marriage over a decade ago); the Muslim body the Conseil français du culte musulman reminds us that “Muslim tradition holds that a person’s life is not their own”. And that, indeed, is the crux of the matter.
This is, then, undoubtedly a secular law and its adoption by the National Assembly is to be welcomed.
Yet the government has largely shied away from using such language, which is a further sign of its pick-and-mix approach to secularism. Take prime minister François Bayrou and interior minister Bruno Retailleau: both openly embrace their Catholic faith, which in their case takes a very conservative form. Both oppose the law on the end of life, especially the proposed offence of obstructing the right to die (echoing the historical opposition of the Right to the offence of obstructing an abortion). Both are also quick to target Muslims.
The prime minister repeated his “question marks” over the bill on Tuesday, just hours before MPs voted. Yet in the very same interview, Bayrou referred to a recent report on the Muslim Brotherhood (the subject of some shameful political manipulation). “Anyone who wants religious law to override civil law does not respect French principles,” he declared. It's almost comical...
Control over our bodies
Put another way, assisted dying also means, for each of us, regaining control over ourselves, our bodies, our lives and our choices. This is especially so in a country where medicine, long cloistered in its own certainties and elitism, has all too often ignored the pain and suffering of its patients.
“The right to die with dignity not only distances itself from a substantialist view of ‘nature’ found in official Catholic doctrine. It also constitutes a criticism of the symbolic shift that has occurred in France (more so than elsewhere) from religion to medicine, to the near-religious extreme deference many people show towards the medical establishment.”
This words are, once again, from Jean Baubérot, co-author with Raphaël Liogier of 'Sacrée médecine. Histoire et devenir d’un sanctuaire de la Raison' ('Sacred Medicine: The History and Future of a Sanctuary of Reason') published by Entrelacs in 2011. He adds: “In addition to traditional clericalism, the secular struggle must add the battle with medical clericalism wherever it rears its head.”
“In 2025 we no longer die the way we did in 1970,” explains intensive care doctor François Blot, who works at a cancer treatment centre in the Paris region and who over time has come to support assisted dying. “Medicine claims to know how to keep people alive, to master nearly everything. At some point, it must accept that it can create survivors whose organs still function but whose life has lost all meaning for them,” he says.
This proposed law is also, of course, a response to the suffering so keenly felt in society; the evidence on this is moving, so too are the individual stories.
Saving the health system
The sincere criticisms of this proposed law also jolt us, move us, or make us question our own certainties and beliefs. This is especially true of the arguments made by anti-ableist campaigners (as in this long op-ed by the disabled group Les Dévalideuses), or by psychologist Sara Piazza, co-author of 'Euthanasie: un progrès social?' In it she writes that assisted dying is a “mask for deadly ultra-liberalism, a way to solve economic problems and implement a quick, cheap end of life for the most fragile”.
As a reminder, the proposed law approved on Tuesday sets clear limits: assisted dying would only be open to those suffering from a “serious and incurable condition, whatever its cause, that is life-threatening, and in an advanced or terminal phase”, and whose physical or psychological suffering is “resistant to treatment”.
Nonetheless, some warn of the risk that the scope of active assisted dying could be expanded for capitalist or neoliberal reasons, casting all those who are no longer as productive as burdens on society. In other words, burdens to be jettisoned as quickly as possible.
The same criticisms are often levelled over abortion rights. Some opponents argue that a number of women seek abortions because of difficult life circumstances and that, in a different setting, they might continue their pregnancies.
Drawing a parallel between abortion and assisted dying may seem bold, even outrageous: in one case, the subject is a foetus with no legal status; whereas assisted dying affects individuals whose humanity is at the heart of the debate. It's very different. Yet echoes exist, and a similar response can be given.
It is not the existence of the right that causes poverty, women’s precarious lives, the parlous state of the health system, the penury of too many palliative care units, or the ableist temptation to dismiss bodies seen as abnormal, useless, too full of pain (for whom and for what?).
It is the public policies put in place by the state, and the budgets voted by our assemblies, that allow, or fail to allow, public services to carry out their mission of common good, for doctors to do their jobs. And that will allow for this newly-created right to be rolled out and supervised.
Judging this country's men and women by their productivity, or by the cost they represent to society, is an unacceptable aberration fuelled by violent liberalism that sorts human beings into categories. There can be no let-up in the fight against this aberration; it is a battle that must be waged with full force.
“Ageism is, indeed, a dominant ideology in our consumer society,” writes Jean Baubérot in relation to the rights of disabled people. He then adds: “The fight against dominant social stereotypes must not come at the expense of the choice to die with dignity. While we must draw attention to this type of issue, it seem to me that it should not stop the emergence of a new freedom.”
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- The original French version of this op-ed can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter