France

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: 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 Read More ›

The French Senate has said “Non” to legalizing assisted suicide. From the Le Monde story: The Sénat, the French Parliament’s upper house, on Wednesday, January 28, rejected a government-backed draft law on assisted dying that had been billed as one of the country’s most important societal changes in more than a decade. The law easily passed the lower Assemblée Nationale last year but was so watered down by right-wing and centrist lawmakers, in often angry and chaotic debate in the upper chamber, that supporters of the initiative said it no longer made sense. So, what did the “watering down” actually change that assisted suicide advocates rejected? The Le Monde story didn’t say. But the Christian Daily International story did: The Senate Read More ›

Encountering little political resistance, the “nature rights” movement continues its march toward legal and institutional respectability. Now, the Council of Paris has asked the French Parliament to grant legal personhood and “rights” to the river Seine. From the RTL Today story: French authorities want to give legal rights to the River Seine to better defend the world-famous waterway in court and protect its fragile ecosystem, part of a global movement to grant legal personhood to nature. In a resolution adopted on Wednesday, the Paris City Council called on parliament to pass a law granting the Seine legal personhood to enable “an independent guardian authority to defend its rights in court.” “The Seine must be able to defend itself, as a Read More ›

As the Biden administration continues to try to use its regulatory powers to force a “gender-affirming” approach to children who question their sex, in other countries the rubber-stamping of a gender-dysphoric child’s belief and the prescribing of puberty-blocking drugs are under serious reconsideration. The U.K., Sweden, Finland, and France — not exactly Bible Belt countries — are all pulling back from the rush to transition children. Now, in the U.K., the Tavistock Gender Clinic — run by the National Health Service — is being shut down because it is not safe for children. From the Daily Mail story: The NHS‘s controversial child transgender clinic will shut its doors after a damning report found it was ‘not safe’ for children. The gender identity service at Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Read More ›