France’s citizens’ council of 150 members of the public will meet on Friday to begin discussions on end-of-life care in France, including whether assisted suicide should be legalised. As French laws have evolved over the last two decades, calls have increased to allow medically assisted deaths for terminally ill patients.
In August 2022, Pascal travelled with his partner Guy from their home in western France to Belgium, where Guy ended his life by euthanasia. “He held on until the end of August to avoid disrupting our children’s summer holidays,” Pascal says. “Otherwise, I think he would have picked an earlier date.”
The couple had six adult children between them, all of whom supported Guy’s decision to have a medically assisted death. Just over 12 months earlier he had been diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, an incurable hereditary condition that causes progressive loss of muscle tissue and sensation throughout the body.
Within six months of his diagnosis, Guy’s health had dramatically deteriorated. “He couldn’t move his arms or his hands anymore, he was starting to have difficulty speaking. Everyone could see that continuing would be unbearable for him,” Pascal says. Choosing to die in Belgium “was a release for him”, he adds. “We were sad but also relieved to see that, for him, there was more happiness [in dying] than being in pain.”
‘A French solution’
There are no exact figures on how many people travel to foreign countries from France to end their lives every year. But a 2015 study found that, within a five-year period, more than 65 people chose to die in Switzerland alone, and numbers were rising each year.
Neighbouring countries including Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Spain, Austria, Finland and Norway all allow some form of euthanasia, where a doctor administers a fatal dose of a suitable drug…
