We were promised a great law of fraternity. We are given a law which authorizes killing. However, there was a place where France could come together without tearing itself apart: the duty to accompany and support, the refusal to abandon and turn away from those who suffer as their death approaches, the commitment to finally provide palliative care everywhere and for everyone.
This demand for unconditional presence with our vulnerable fellow citizens was our ethical compass. We were attached to it. It was expressed one last time on May 11, 2026, almost unanimously in Parliament, in the vote on the law on support and palliative care.
A misunderstanding of reality
And from then on it was made the guarantee, the decor, the alibi for its exact opposite: the authorization, by the law of the Republic, to deliberately cause death. No moral necessity dictated this reversal. Only political calculations explain why such a text results as the absolute emergency of our country, yet weakened by the inability of political decision-makers to assume their responsibilities where they are expected.
Today, the inability to manage the heatwave, to mobilize our health system, bloodless from years of neglect, to support local solidarity with those more exposed than others due to precariousness and loneliness, reveals a misunderstanding of reality, a misunderstanding of what matters to us.
And it is to the conditions of the practices of euthanasia that parliamentarians are devoting themselves with the resolution to allow the “societal law” of the President of the Republic to succeed at all costs. This “new right” is the ultimate promise shared by politicians delegitimized in their indecisions and their picrocholine battles while society is unraveling for lack of cohesion and a social project which unites around values revoked by this impatience to establish a “right to die”.
Let’s face it. The Senate rejected this text twice. The National Assembly only adopted it by a small majority. The joint committee between the two assemblies failed. And it is by the sole artifice of the last word left to the National Assembly that administered death could enter into our law.
Ethical and democratic defeat
Not because it would impose itself as a duty of solidarity which would provide an exceptional, strictly supervised response to people in a situation of insurmountable suffering: but because the institutions were unable to agree and a presidential will did not want to let go.
Forceps law. Default law. Law of stubbornness. We are required to welcome progress where there is only capitulation, and to celebrate progress where there is defeat.
The rout is first and foremost ethical. The National Consultative Ethics Committee, supposed guardian of our collective prudence, itself forced the lock. His opinion of September 13, 2022, by pitting autonomy against solidarity, made thinkable what we held to be unsurpassable: that a society does not organize the death given to its members, and does not consider that its individual request can cause the collapse of an ethic of care and support.
The body has taken up the issue itself, and no one yet wants to weigh the consequences. Because a transgression never stays in its place. What was the exception becomes a right. The law becomes a norm. The norm becomes an expectation. And for the most fragile, the wait will quickly turn into a silent injunction to no longer weigh on the living.
The rout is democratic. A citizens’ convention was convened by drawing lots and its conclusions were disguised as a people’s verdict. But a deliberation is only as good as the questions that are asked, the framing that precedes it, the staging that surrounds it. Consent was not obtained. It was made. We then held up a percentage as proof, ignoring that the answer was already contained in the way the question was asked.
Violence against care
The rout occurred, above all, against those who had the authority to speak about it since their daily commitment is this sometimes long-term encounter with the person at the end of life, at home or in an establishment, who solicits in trust a human relationship which testifies to an attention which never gives in to the temptations of denial. Caregivers. Those who tirelessly watch at the bedside of the dying, and who know what support means.
They were ostracized. We put their alerts in the section of conservative reluctance, their experience in the store of bygone times. Legislate on death by excluding those who take care of life until the last breath. We must name this inversion for what it is: a violence done to care itself.
What we are sold as liberation is an ideological construction. We have made autonomy absolute, to the point of cutting it off from everything that makes it human: relationships, concern, belonging to a community that does not let go of its own.
We have made the freedom to die the horizon of a policy, when a democracy is judged by its capacity to surround those who suffer and to be hospitable to them, to recognize them with social dignity and consideration precisely when they themselves suspect it. What exactly is a political rout? That’s exactly it. The absence of any ambition, of any future worthy of what a nation owes to itself.
To the dying we owe a presence
Rather than redouble our presence with those who are relegated by illness, rather than finally employing the means of support and relief, rather than making a place for them among us, showing them an attachment without compromising, we open the exit door for them.
We are tearing down, one by one, the values that held us together. We dismember the coherence and cohesion which make a people a body, and not a simple addition of contracting solitudes. The law which was to proclaim our fraternity will proclaim our abdication.
It is time to break away from this shift. In the name of fraternity and justice. Because the values of a true democracy never charge the law with causing the death of those it should protect. They refuse to let anyone have to die to stop suffering.
To the dying we owe a presence, not a procedure. A loyalty, not a lethal substance. Nothing is yet lost of what we hold dear, as long as we agree to defend it. But before the vote, we need at least the courage to name the rout. And that of refusing to take part in it. Nothing about this shipwreck is inevitable.
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