Assisted dying: the last word freedom? | EUROtoday

Published on : 05/20/2024 – 4:10 p.m.Modified : 05/20/2024 – 4:12 p.m.

Loïc Résibois is 46 years outdated. His Charcot illness was recognized in September 2022. For a number of months, his physique has not carried it. This former common intelligence policeman and high-level tennis participant can not do something with out the assistance of his spouse, Caroline. Very lucid, he explains to us that Charcot illness is an sickness which extinguishes all of the muscle tissues of the physique one after the other. “Basically,” he continues, “you’re a vegetable with a brain.”

Loïc has due to this fact determined to make assisted dying with dignity his battle and is rising his interventions within the media and on social networks. He believes that this help in dying is “a freedom, which in no way encroaches on that of others. If some do not want to benefit from it, it’s simple, they just don’t have to ask for it”.

The textual content desired by Emmanuel Macron gives for a number of standards: being of age, residing in France or being of French nationality, affected by an incurable sickness in a complicated or terminal part, with the ability to categorical one's final needs with discernment, affected by insufferable ache or refractory to remedy.

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A invoice which isn’t considered favorably on the Maison de Gardanne, close to Aix-en-Provence. This palliative care institution, co-founded by Doctor Jean-Marc La Piana thirty years in the past, welcomes individuals affected by incurable diseases. Humanity and sensitivity are the important thing phrases: we aren’t speaking about sick individuals or sufferers, however about residents. The caregivers put on neither coats nor badges. Families may be current 24 hours a day.

Alain Fourneau is being handled there for most cancers and even when this former theater director thinks {that a} regulation should exist for many who want it, he explains to us that his keep on this institution modified his view on assisted dying: ” This spoke to me a few months ago, but it’s true that after an experience like this, it can be measured, it can really be measured.” Jean-Marc La Piana is convinced: if patients were better cared for, there would be many fewer requests for euthanasia. The doctor believes that it is therefore necessary to develop palliative care as a priority and not to mix everything in a single law.

In France today, when the patient's vital prognosis is at risk in the short term, the Claeys Leonetti law of 2016 allows them to benefit from deep and continuous sedation until death, without going as far as active euthanasia. Deep and continuous sedation or assistance in dying with injection of a lethal product, the subject divides even within the medical world.

Bernard Senet is a retired general practitioner. He is one of the few in France to admit to having carried out euthanasia. Around sixty, in hospital or at home. Today, the former family doctor is indicted for helping patients obtain penthotal, a barbiturate banned in France. But he regrets nothing: “There is a moment when the illness wins and at that moment, we must not let go of the patient and tell him that he must fend for himself.”

Like Loïc Résibois, Bernard Senet believes that the law should recognize euthanasia as a final act of care. Both hope that it will be adopted as quickly as possible.

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