2023-07-14 10:15:35
At the palliative care unit of the Eugénie hospital in Ajaccio, on April 23, 2020. PASCAL POCHARD-CASABIANCA / AFP
No to “euthanasia”, yes to the« assistance au suicide ». The National Academy of Medicine decides, in an opinion made public on Wednesday July 12, for the registration in the law of a very precise form of active assistance in dying. As much as it advocates the right to “assisted suicide consisting in making a lethal product available to a person who requests it and self-administers it”as much as she rejects “euthanasia consisting of the administration by a third party of a lethal product to a person who requests it”.
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The opinion of the institution of rue Bonaparte is timely for the government, which is preparing a bill on the end of life promised by Emmanuel Macron to“here at the end of summer”. Contrary to its past positions on the subject, the last of which dates from June 2021, the Academy provides medical support for the ambition of the executive to establish a right to active assistance in dying. A precious pledge when he is the target of hostility from more than a dozen learned societies and organizations of health professionals. They are campaigning so that the future law does not require caregivers to perform the gesture or prescribe a lethal product, even if a patient’s request meets the criteria of the law. These caregivers claim that “to kill is not a cure”, according to the formula of the French Association for support and palliative care.
On June 28, Agnès Firmin Le Bodo, who had just discovered the unpublished opinion of the Academy, was delighted in advance: “The reflection carried out by the National Academy of Medicine in no way constitutes a renunciation, a rupture, had then noted the minister delegate in charge of territorial organization and health professions. But, on the contrary, it offers a support path so that all vulnerabilities are precisely considered. This is the expression of an ethical journey that I particularly want to salute. »
“Difficult but reasonable task”
The Academy starts from the observation that it would be “it is inhuman, when the vital prognosis is committed not in the short but in the medium term, not to respond to the despair of people who ask for the means to shorten the suffering they suffer because of a serious and incurable illness”. She deduces “that aiming to help those who cannot die as harmlessly as possible within the scope of the current law is a difficult but reasonable task through the prudent and framed incorporation of a new law”.
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