France Legalizes Euthanasia

The West continues its love affair with the culture of death as the French National Assembly just voted to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide, overriding the Senate’s rejection. I haven’t read the bill, but here are a few notes I discerned from various media reports:

• The bill does not require terminal illness. Rather, it requires a “serious and incurable illness” that “threatens life in an advanced or terminal stage” — meaning death could be years away. The patient must also experience “constant physical or psychological suffering” related to the disease that is “resistant to treatment or unbearable” (as defined by the patient). Psychological suffering alone does not make one eligible for hastened death.
• There is no time set for when a disease “threatens life.”
• Only French legal residents and citizens 18 and over are eligible.
• Doctors can kill requesting patients when they are unable to kill themselves. Inability to self-administer death is not defined.
• There is only a two-day waiting period between approved request and the ability to become dead.
• There are no meaningful conscience protections for doctors unwilling to kill or prescribe poison nor explicit protections for dissenting health-care institutions. While doctors need not personally end life, they must be complicit by providing patients with the names of doctors willing to do the lethal deed.
• France’s national health service will pay for the death (which could save it a lot of money, as expensive patients will be no more).

Please remember that the law as it currently exists will surely not be the permanent ceiling of permissibility, but as other jurisdictions illustrate, merely be the launching pad for an ever more expansive euthanasia regime. Moreover, even these weak-tea parameters will probably not be enforced meaningfully, because that’s how the culture of death rolls. And once euthanasia starts, it picks up steam year by year as hastened death becomes normalized.

The constitutionality of the law will surely be litigated, which could theoretically prevent it from going into effect. We will see, but that kind of holding action rarely works, and even when it does — as in Portugal — the prohibition doesn’t last for long.