In January the French Senate rejected the “aide à mourir” (aid in dying) bill that was passed by the National Assembly in 2025 as part of President Macron’s second-term social agenda. It now returns to the Assembly.

It’s astonishing how similar such bills are to each other even long after they’ve proved in other countries to be based on medically dubious terms. The bill would create a right to aid in dying under certain conditions. The person must be an adult, with a serious incurable illness and a “vital prognosis engaged in the short or medium term.” This is similar to the prognosis of “six months or less” that has been introduced in American states and to the U.K. bill. There is simply no objective medical basis for making this prognosis, and studies have shown it to be highly unreliable.

The conscience clause of the bill is entirely inadequate, in that it demands of objecting doctors that they direct patients to willing providers.

But of course the worst part of the bill is that ultimately it conflates killing with care. And so it subtly and covertly confers on patients the entirely spurious “duty” not to be burdensome at the end of life. Opponents of these bills have to make the case not just that these systems invite abuse, and inevitably expand the demand for suicide and increase the supply to meet the demand, but that they propose an ugly lie about human existence itself: that the myth of full autonomy in every stage of life itself becomes a deadly authoritarian threat to life.

© National Review