“Do we measure the risk of opening the dizzying project of the legitimacy of the request to access death? »

2023-11-12 12:00:05

Debating acutely the right to assisted suicide requires keeping in mind “the side effects” that this change will bring about in our society’s relationship to life, to others and to intimacy. In law, two clear limits exist: it is prohibited to kill others, including at their request, and suicide is not prohibited.

If each individual is “free” to end their life, this gesture is however neither a right nor a freedom in the legal sense of the term, no legal instrument guaranteeing it. On the contrary, our law requires us to help the person who is trying to end their life. Whatever the underlying motivations for a suicidal gesture, the level of clairvoyance of its author and the autonomy of his will, the penal code punishes for failure to assist a person in danger anyone who does not attempt to save a person. facing imminent danger.

The law even authorizes, within strictly defined frameworks, to hospitalize a person without their consent to treat them for depression which takes away all desire to live and deprives them of discernment. In the same vein, healthcare providers incur criminal liability when they fail to fulfill their monitoring obligations and the hospitalized patient in their care ends his or her life.

Set legal criteria

This body of rules testifies to two essential values ​​which underpin our social contract and permeate all law: the primordial nature of life and the duty of solidarity. From these crossed and absolute values ​​– because no subjective judgment on the type of life that society wishes to support governs their implementation – result from subjective rights in favor of vulnerable people, policies for the management of disability and the prevention of disability. suicide. The latter are crucial in a country like France, where the suicide rate per capita is one of the highest in Europe.

If the law were to henceforth guarantee the individual the freedom to commit suicide and others the duty to assist them in the name of respecting their will, how will these rights and obligations be reconciled? Obviously, the supporters of reform do not want the abandonment of policies in favor of the most vulnerable.

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However, the only way to maintain overall consistency will be to set legal criteria which will strictly regulate this right. Will arise by the very fact an even more difficult question: that of knowing who, in the eyes of the law, is legitimate to obtain assistance in dying. The person at the end of life who is not relieved by anything? The young anorexic girl who stubbornly refuses to eat and whose life hangs by a thread? The person who is not at the end of life but whose moral suffering and the prospect of illness have definitively taken away all desire to live? The inmate sentenced to years in prison who, in conscience, no longer wishes to continue? The senile old man who asked to receive assisted suicide if he became insane?

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