Image – Shutterstock: The French Senate, Paris
France’s proposed assisted suicide legislation has been left in jeopardy after the Senate rejected the central provision of a death bill that had already been heavily diluted, leaving the text largely hollowed out.
On Wednesday evening, senators voted down Article 4, the keystone of the bill, by 144 votes to 123. The rejection prompted the president of the Senate’s Social Affairs Committee, Philippe Mouillé, to concede that the text “no longer makes sense” in its current form.
The bill had already been substantially rewritten at committee stage in an attempt to bridge deep political and ethical divisions. The original proposal, which established a “right to assisted dying”, was replaced with the narrower concept of “medical assistance in dying”. Access was limited to patients whose death was imminent in the very short term, defined by the High Authority for Health as a matter of hours or days.
In practice, critics argued that this narrowing stripped the bill of any real assisted dying framework, reducing it to a largely symbolic measure that overlapped with existing end-of-life care. Several senators noted that, once amended, the text functioned less as an assisted dying law and more as an indirect reinforcement of palliative care provisions.
Even this revised version failed to secure support. Voting exposed sharp fractures across the chamber. Conservative Republicans were split, centrists divided between support, opposition, and abstention, while Socialist senators voted unanimously against the article. Communists largely supported it, and Greens abstained.
Debate in the chamber also focused on palliative care, with several senators criticising the legislative sequence. Amendments proposing mandatory offers of palliative care or greater use of advance directives were described as ineffective under the committee’s version of the bill, given its extremely narrow eligibility criteria.
Bernard Fialiaire, a centrist senator, said he was “shocked” that assisted suicide had been debated before addressing shortcomings in palliative care, warning that the order risked reinforcing the idea that assisted suicide could compensate for inadequate end-of-life services. A separate bill specifically aimed at expanding palliative care, seen as far less divisive, is due to be examined later this week.
Political tensions were heightened by accusations of shifting positions on the right, following comments by Republican leader Bruno Retailleau, who rejected any legislation that would deliberately hasten death, describing it as a fundamental rupture in France’s ethical framework. Republican senators insisted, however, that votes were taken according to individual conscience rather than party instruction.
Despite the rejection of its core article, Health Minister Stéphanie Rist indicated that the government would not withdraw the bill, arguing that doing so would bring the parliamentary process to a halt.
Michael Robinson, Executive Director of SPUC, says, “Nobody has a right to be killed by the state, and we are thoroughly glad to see that the French Senate have voted overwhelmingly to prevent that from becoming a reality. They have taken a great step to preserve the dignity of French people at the end of life instead of selling them the lie that suicide is care. We hope that, in a comparable way, the House of Lords in Westminster will kill England & Wales’ assisted suicide Bill once and for all.”
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