This Monday, May 12, The National Assembly will examine two law proposals on palliative care and active help to die. Since 2016, the end of life in France has been supervised by the Claeys-Léonetti law which establishes that incurable patients can benefit from “deep and continuous sedation until death”, a different concept from those which will be discussed by the deputies for these new texts, and those that have runs in foreign countries authorizing euthanasia. What are these different expressions and what do they designate?
Palliative care
These are active care issued in a global approach to the person with serious, scalable or terminal disease. Their objective is, according to the SFAP (French Society for Palliative Support and Care), to relieve physical pain and other symptoms, but also to take into account psychic, social or spiritual suffering.
Euthanasia
It is an “act intended to deliberately end the life of a person suffering from a serious and incurable disease, at his request, in order to put an end to a situation that she considers unbearable”, according to the definition retained by the National Ethics Advisory Committee (CCNE) in a 2013 opinion. In France, euthanasia is prohibited unlike, for example, in Belgium or in the Netherlands where it is supervised by law.
Suicide assistance
Still according to the CCNE, assistance to suicide “consists in giving the means to a person to commit suicide himself (…) by absorbing a lethal product which was previously issued”. Unlike euthanasia, it is therefore the person himself who performs the fatal gesture, and not a third party.
Assisted suicide
The difference with euthanasia is tenuous, but in the case of assisted suicide, the person who wants to commit suicide but who is not physically capable of it, needs the action of a third party. Assisted suicide “mobilizes more closely than assistance to suicide a third party,” notes the CCNE.
Active help to die
Euthanasia and suicide assistance can be considered as variations of the concept of “active help to die”. In April 2023, The Citizen Convention on the End of Life Surprised for the legalization of euthanasia and assistance to suicide.
Deep and continuous sedation until death
It is an already authorized measure for the patients in terminal phase and in very great suffering, whose life is threatened “in the short term”. It consists in sleeping irreversibly and stopping to artificially feed and hydrate an incurable patient at the end of life, as provided for in the 2016 Claeys-Léontti law.
