Ambivalence turns deadly

It’s being called “a storm in a presidential skull.” This is not a reference to our president this time, but French President Emmanuel Macron, deliberating over exactly how his country is going to legislate euthanasia. Currently, it is illegal, although doctors and nurses are permitted to sedate the dying until they pass away. Some have used this provision to walk right up to the line of legality, and some admit they’ve crossed it. But a new bill, if eventually approved, may draw the line in a different place.

WORLD has covered what euthanasia looks like in countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada, which all seem to be racing each other to the bottom. But France won’t be sliding down the slippery slope with them. Or so its president wants to believe. Ever since announcing the creation of a citizens’ assembly on the issue in 2022, Macron’s public statements have been scrupulously political. “The pope knows that I will not just do anything,” he reportedly said after a visit with Pope Francis at the time. Then and multiple times since, he has said he dislikes the word “euthanasia,” which in his words makes death sound like “a technical act.”

It reportedly took a long time for him to find a replacement term he was happy with, but in a recent interview, he now favors the suitably vague “assisted dying.” In principle, the idea is that patients will administer the “treatment” themselves, with a possible exception for those too physically handicapped to take it unassisted. But Macron wants “strict conditions”— no minors, no mentally ill or incapable elderly people, nobody without “a life-threatening prognosis in the short or medium term,” and nobody who is simply depressed or suicidal. Meanwhile, he also intends to reassess and improve palliative care measures. With these guardrails in place, what could go wrong?

Aside from the fact that there’s already plenty wrong with such a bill, this is hopelessly naïve. Such legislation invariably progresses according to the law of leftist entropy. Perhaps Macron still quietly fears this, which is why the process has been so delayed. The French paper Le Monde suggests that he “lost control of the debate” to more aggressive activists in his orbit, who don’t mince words about their frustration. One former French MP says Macron will be remembered for lacking “courage.” Another says his indecisiveness is “sickening.” “There was a citizens’ convention. And that was that.”

That convention was composed of 185 randomly selected scientists, legal professionals, and health professionals—a democratic experiment in the same vein as a climate convention Macron set up in 2019. While they hold no legal power, Macron was clearly swayed by their resounding 76 percent majority vote to move forward with the euthanasia bill. Such political outsourcing has a strong appeal for him, no doubt because it allows him to shift moral responsibility.

But the assembly’s decision doesn’t represent all French doctors and nurses, some of whom boldly spoke out in a long survey piece by Le Monde last November. One experienced palliative care nurse reports that many patients say they want to die near the end of their lives, but “thank goodness we do not take it literally!” Clinical psychologist Sara Piazza says that as a woman of the left, she used to favor “assisted dying,” but her views have radically evolved through her own work in palliative care. She and her colleague Isabelle Marin have co-written a monograph arguing that France’s poorest and most vulnerable will be “the first victims” of a legislative shift. “What kind of society do we want to promote?” they ask. It’s a damning question.

From the Le Monde survey, one retired doctor said euthanasia would go against “the Christian upbringing I received, which says ‘Thou shalt not kill.’” Sadly, not all European Christian leaders have been a beacon of light on this issue, but some French bishops led by example last year with a powerful letter to the faithful. “Giving death in order to suppress suffering is neither care nor accompaniment,” they write clearly. They warn that so far from relieving suffering, the practice will only increase “the remorse and guilt that insidiously gnaw at the heart of the human being who has consented to the death of his fellow man, until he meets the mercy of the Living God.”

As for Macron, he is described as religiously agnostic, although curiously, he requested baptism at age twelve after growing up in a non-religious home. Where exactly he stands on the Living God today, nobody is quite sure. To quote one former health minister, “I’ve never been able to figure out what was going on in the president’s head.”

Indeed, we may never know. One gets a cumulative picture of a profoundly ambivalent man. Still, the president seems to have made a choice, a choice which in his mind is compassionate and humane. But in the dark of the night, some part of him must realize that once he gives France the first push down the slope, it’s not a question of whether they will keep going. It’s just a question of how fast.