Assisted dying becomes a right in France

After several years of debate, assisted dying is now a right. The law was published this Wednesday in the Official Journal in the wake of its promulgation by Emmanuel Macron.

Validated by the Constitutional Council last week with some reservations, the text creates a right to assisted dying, under several conditions, for certain patients, allowing them to administer a lethal product in the presence of a caregiver. If, and only if, the patient cannot physically perform the procedure, the caregiver can take care of it.

Very strict conditions

Several conditions must be combined. The patient must be an adult, French or a long-term resident, suffer from a “serious and incurable” illness in a terminal or “advanced” phase, suffer unbearably physically and be capable of expressing an informed choice until the last moment. A procedure, carried out by a single doctor but requiring other actors to be involved, must make it possible to determine whether a patient is eligible or not.

Before caregivers are able to put into practice the text, definitively adopted in Parliament in mid-July, the government will have to publish the necessary implementing decrees.

A relatively small circle of countries have already opened this right, from Belgium to the Netherlands via Switzerland, Canada and Uruguay.