We want care, not euthanasia !
At the moment when MPs are starting to examine the end-of-life bills in a public debate, Alliance VITA organised some fifty gatherings throughout France to alert about the shortage of access to care and against the legalisation of euthanasia.
Outdoors, 46 makeshift hospitals represented by militants in patients’ gowns were deployed, on the same day, throughout continental France and at Fort-de-France as a warning to MPs. The thousands of witness accounts collected by Alliance VITA in the context of its “We want care, not euthanasia” campaign, confirm the increasing difficulty for the French public in obtaining access to care and their consensual expectations: that the health system should be reformed as a matter of urgency so that, everywhere, carers and health institutions should be able to meet the needs of the population.
In that context, the obstinacy in challenging the prohibition against killing is revealed as being particularly irresponsible: euthanasia or assisted suicide cannot be considered as a response to the shortfalls in public health policies. Nevertheless, that is the danger which threatens.
As recalled by Tugdual Derville, the Alliance VITA spokesman in Paris, alongside the National Assembly:
“The situation is all the more serious since the words euthanasia and assisted suicide have been carefully disguised.”
Alliance VITA specifically denounced, during its audition by the social affairs Commission MPs, the illusory nature of the criteria claiming to restrict access to euthanasia. Being both extensive and unverifiable, they are mere decoys for reassurance purposes. The experience of foreign states has shown that none of the promised safeguards survive over time.
By lying on the ground, the demonstrators wished to give voice to all those who, weakened by disease, handicap or old age, would feel pushed towards the way out: when a law suggests that there are lives which are not worth living and patients not worth treating, that points to a society of exclusion by the over-evaluation of usefulness and performance. The demonstrators therefore called upon MPs to be aware of the danger of this text for social cohesion and the inclusion of the most vulnerable. They held up placards stating, “We want care, not euthanasia”.
Tugdual Derville explained:
“Yes for a law to develop palliative care. No for a law to legalise euthanasia and assisted suicide disguised behind the masquerade of “assistance in dying”. “Care, is to help life, until its term, providing relief and appeasement, without therapeutic obstinacy nor euthanasia”,
as concluded by the Alliance VITA spokesman.
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