PARIS, March 13, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — The French National Assembly has approved the main articles of a new “End of Life” law creating “new rights for the ill and for persons at the end of life.” While the law stops short of open legalization of euthanasia or assisted suicide, it aims to give all patients whose death is imminent and whose suffering cannot be alleviated the right to obtain “deep and continuous sedation” until death, coupled with withdrawal of all foods and fluids, explicitly considered as “treatments” and not ordinary care under the law.
Patients suffering from a “serious condition” – which can be construed to designate a handicap or an illness – also would have a right to deep and continuous sedation should they choose to forego or stop life-maintaining treatment: an amputation for instance, or artificial ventilation. But also – the wording of the text is very general – dialysis, chemotherapy, and other treatments without which the patient would die.
The text also provides for persons who cannot make their will known because they are in a coma, in a “vegetative state” or, perhaps, demented: advance directives will be considered binding, obliging doctors to procure deep and continuous sedation without food or hydration when the patient has reached the condition described in his or her living will.
In fact, the patient’s decision would be binding in all these situations, no provision being made for conscientious objection for doctors opposing the procedure on moral grounds or because they are of the opinion their patient can improve or obtain relief from his pain.
These new “patient’s rights” are founded on the concept of patient autonomy, as opposed to the old-fashioned, “paternalistic” situation, as one of the law’s rapporteurs named it, where doctors have full powers to make decisions and impose them on their patients.
The objective of the law, drafted by socialist parliamentarian Alain Claeys and opposition member Jean Leonetti, is to give everyone the right to a “dignified and appeased end of life.” Proponents of the text argue that as the moment of death is not predictable under profound sedation the law is not creating a form of euthanasia. But a few days before the debate at the National Assembly began, the French Academy of Medicine underscored the “ambiguity” of the concept of deep sedation, which can cover many different situations, from acceptable alleviation of unbearable pain, to the voluntary ending of life: euthanasia.
At the same time 175 doctors co-signed an op-ed in the Figaro voicing their worry that the Leonetti-Claeys law is paving the way for a “change of paradigm,” in which sedation can be chosen in order to shorten a human life and imposed on doctors by patients who will have become “clients.”
Cardinal Philippe Barbarin of Lyons, and representatives of the Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim faiths also signed a collective op-ed in the Monde, “launching a joint appeal, anxious and pressing, that this possible new law will not in any way violate this basic principle: all human life must be respected particularly at the moment when it is most fragile.”
All these reactions have come very late. While a number of pro-life organizations such as the Fondation Jérôme Lejeune, Alliance Vita, and a group called “Soulager mais pas tuer” (care not kill) have been active in warning the public against the law’s endorsement of “slow euthanasia,” few politicians decided to join the fight against the Leonetti-Claeys law, which is being touted as a consensual text.
The same process took place in 2005 when Jean Leonetti obtained a unanimous vote for his first “End of life” law, which already provided for “slow euthanasia” insofar as it allowed doctors to withdraw treatment from patients in a serious condition without hope of improvement. While that law does not designate foods and fluids directly administered to the stomach as “artificial,” in practice it has been used to stop feeding deeply handicapped persons in order to obtain their death.
Such is the case for Vincent Lambert, France’s Terri Schiavo, who has obtained a reprieve thanks to a legal battle that his parents have not yet definitively won. The decision in the case is pending at the European Court of Human Rights.
As then, opponents to the law are few and far between. At the National Assembly, only a handful of parliamentarians voted for a long series of amendments by which they hoped to change the law in order to make it applicable only for patients who are genuinely at the point of death. They were the same representatives who had battled against same-sex “marriage.”
On the other side of the debate, several socialist and Green representatives introduced amendments explicitly to legalize euthanasia or assisted suicide. Their propositions were rejected but by a relatively small margin of 20 votes in a total of about 150 deputies present (out of 557 in the legislature). One of the proponents of euthanasia, Roger-Gérard Schwartzenberg, underscored the cruelty of using starvation and dehydration – which can lead to protracted agonies. He added the procedure does not make for a “dignified and appeased death” as the definitive loss of consciousness does not allow “for any communication of the patient with his near and dear ones.”
After having been examined article by article, the Leonetti-Claeys law will come back before the Assembly on March 17 for a solemn vote.
During question period last Wednesday, when the text first came before the French Assembly, Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who had himself presented a euthanasia law a few years ago, made clear that the present text is only a “step on the way.” Health Minister Marisol Touraine was to add the next day that the socialist government had decided on the present text so as not to “rush things” in the face of public opinion.