Assisted dying: Bruno Retailleau opposes the text, Line Renaud and Gabriel Attal defend it

A sensitive debate is making a comeback on the political scene. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau on Saturday denounced the law on assisted dying , which will be debated starting 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 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, 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."

"Patients who wish to be accompanied towards death do so neither out of whim nor out of frivolity," but rather because "the suffering no longer finds a way out," they write, expressing their desire to "sound the alarm."

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," and insisted that it would not create "an anthropological rupture" due to the many conditions set. The end-of-life bill was split into two bills, one on assisted dying and the other, much more consensual, on palliative care.

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 "in the medium term" or on a "terminal phase" of illness, but it suggests taking into account "the quality of the rest of the person's life".