“Old age will not be a criterion for access to assisted dying”, repeat over and over again ministers and deputies responsible for defending the text on “assisted dying”. This assertion is debatable. The bill clearly indicates that, to access this potential new right, you must be suffering from a serious and incurable illness, in an advanced phase, have unbearable suffering and be able to express your wishes.
In fact, people meeting these different criteria will statistically be the oldest. This is not a surprise, people at the end of their lives are overwhelmingly older, with the average age of death in France being 79.4 years for men and 85.3 years for women.
No financial outcome
The pathologies causing death and making them eligible for assistance in dying are more present with advancing age. Belgium and Canada classify under the expression “polypathologies” the cocktail of conditions linked to old age making them eligible for euthanasia. In Belgium, in 2025, they will justify almost a third of recourses to euthanasia, making it the second cause of recourse after cancer. And the one whose progression is the most dynamic.
So, why such stubbornness among the defenders of the text in France to repeat that this law does not concern old age? Perhaps to avoid seeing a reality that we struggle to face: the failing care of our elders. Because if it is abusive to assert that this project on “assisted dying” is motivated by economic reasons – to push expensive elderly people out – we can fear that “assisted dying” will be chosen due to lack of care for some of our elders.
Failures in care are systemic. This is explained by underfinancing of the autonomy branch of Social Security: 42 billion euros in 2025 and a deficit of 1.7 billion in 2026, even though it was only created six years ago. And this will not get better: by 2050, the number of people over 85 will almost double.
Financially, there is no way out, except to create a big bang in Social Security, massively levy new contributions or cut very sharply on other branches: pensions, illness, family or unemployment. The government knows this well, and in the current state of the political situation in the country, it is incapable of providing a response.
Welcoming the end of life
Closer to us, the nursing home mechanism is also in great pain. Deficit management, chronic lack of caregivers, repeated scandals: the model is in crisis, and all the federations of caregivers and facility managers say so. On this subject, the government is also having difficulty finding solutions.
But even more than this financial crisis, the question of nursing homes and old age also reveals a moral problem that concerns us all. Our lives and our society are no longer organized to accommodate dependent elderly people, while the needs are exploding.
We no longer have the means to accommodate the end of life
Demanding work, necessary leisure time, prices of housing and home services making financial equations impossible, explosion of family units, geographical mobility, worsening and multiplication of pathologies linked to the extension of life: we no longer have the space and the means in our daily lives to accommodate the end of life.
This reality is experienced by hundreds of thousands of French people every day. Dependency and old age have become painful wounds for many of us, and legitimate fears for all, even beyond physical or psychological degradation.
Overheated room, meals at 6 p.m., lack of freedom, disappearance of small pleasures, of small risks. Return of infantilization, systemic organization of isolation in standardized buildings, often built on the outskirts of the world of the living. This is what too often we put our parents or grandparents through, against our will and against theirs. And this is what we are about to experience… unless it was possible to leave earlier. So, no connection between “the right to assisted dying” and old age, really?
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