Euthanasia: French Government Buying Time

On January 21, 2025, François Bayrou, Prime Minister of France, announced that he wanted to enshrine a law on palliative care before legislating on euthanasia, thus reshuffling the legislative cards that the short-lived government of Gabriel Attal had dealt them last year.
"A law on palliative care could be voted on very widely and perhaps even unanimously," explains Claire Fourcade, president of the French Society for Palliative Care and Support (SFAP), in the columns of Le Figaro.
And the practitioner declared that the current head of the French government "puts things in the right order," because "wanting to be relieved and wanting to die are not the same request."
It must be said that in terms of palliative care, France is lagging behind. "France, which was ahead of its time twenty-five years ago, when the policy of access to palliative care for all was launched, has fallen way behind.”
"20% of departments do not have a palliative care unit and 50% of people who would need access to one cannot be accommodated, while the ageing of the population will increase this gap. This must be filled by training caregivers and opening services and beds. We must accelerate the ambition, set out in the initial bill, to invest 100 million euros per year over ten years to upgrade the system," Frédéric Valletoux, former Minister of Health, explained to Le Figaro.
On the side of the death-by-physician advocates, there is rather consternation: "There is a certain hypocrisy on the part of the Prime Minister in advocating a specific text on palliative care, a crucial area that urgently needs new funding, but not a law.”
"The risk is that once this symbolic text is adopted, the issue of assisted dying will be marginalized. Especially since the parliamentary calendar could make the adoption of a second text by the end of the five-year term uncertain,” reacts the editorial staff of Le Monde bitterly.
The Prime Minister’s proposal has caused an outcry. François Bayrou “is constantly trying to bury the text on the end of life,” asserts Sandrine Rousseau, an environmentalist MP, faithful to taking the opposite view of common sense, whether by showing indulgence with regard to the sordid murders of French people committed by immigrants on our soil, or with regard to political Islam, which she and her friends have made their political stock-in-trade.
While the decision by the current Prime Minister is far from blocking the road to a later legalization of euthanasia, it at least has the merit of defusing the legislative bomb designed by Emmanuel Macron which would link the palliative care component to euthanasia, so that the former serves as a screen for the latter.
(Sources : Le Monde/Le Figaro – FSSPX.Actualités)
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