Assisted dying: Bruno Retailleau denounces a "deeply unbalanced" text, Line Renaud and Gabriel Attal defend it

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau denounced the text on assisted dying on Saturday, May 10, which will be debated from Monday in the National Assembly, while singer Line Renaud and former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal co-signed a column defending it.

This text is "deeply unbalanced" and "breaks all the barriers. It is not a text of appeasement, it is a text of anthropological rupture," Bruno Retailleau told the Journal du Dimanche regarding the bill tabled by Olivier Falorni (affiliated with the Modem).

"If it were voted on as it stands, it would become easier to ask for death than to be treated," denounces the LR minister, speaking of a text which "is one of renunciation, of abandonment."

"I will fight because our society needs palliative care, not the legalization of euthanasia," warns Bruno Retailleau.

"While no one wants to die, some people may want to stop suffering," argue Line Renaud, who is 96, and Gabriel Attal, 36, in the columns of La Tribune Dimanche .

For them, "to oppose any change in the law out of conservatism is to put one's dogmatism before the suffering of the sick. It is to fail in one's duty to listen and to be humane in order to impose one's morality."

Line Renaud and Gabriel Attal, who chairs the Macronist group Together for the Republic in the National Assembly, are therefore calling for action "to offer patients freedom of choice."

At the end of April, MPs approved the bill in the Social Affairs Committee to allow patients with a "serious and incurable condition" that is "life-threatening, in an advanced or terminal phase" and who can no longer bear their suffering, to receive or administer a lethal substance.

Health Minister Catherine Vautrin said last month that the provision of assisted dying is "essential for those whose suffering (...) cannot be alleviated," ensuring that it does not create "an anthropological rupture" due to the many conditions set.

In an opinion, the High Authority for Health deemed it "impossible", due to a lack of medical consensus, to determine who could benefit from assisted dying based on a vital prognosis committed "in the medium term" or on a "terminal phase" of illness, but it suggests taking into account "the quality of the rest of the life" of the person.

The text on the end of life was split into two bills, one on assisted dying and the other, much more consensual, on palliative care.