Jean Messiha: Hippocrates Betrayed, Death Elevated to Care

France stands on the brink of a historic rupture with medical ethics as the National Assembly prepares to vote on July 15th on legislation that would, for the first time in the history of the Republic, transform death from a natural conclusion into a state-sanctioned medical procedure.

According to Valeurs Actuelles, the proposed law on active assistance in dying represents a fundamental break with the Hippocratic Oath, which for 2,400 years has forbidden physicians from administering poison or suggesting its use. What was once considered either criminal or an act of absolute desperation is being repackaged as a public service.

The legislation explicitly establishes a right to lethal substances that patients may self-administer or have administered by a physician or nurse when physically unable to do so themselves. Most troublingly, Article 2, paragraph 7 of the draft law grants automatic criminal immunity to healthcare professionals participating in these acts, marking an unprecedented step in modern French legislative history.

From Palliative Care to Administered Death

The new framework represents a radical departure from the Claeys-Leonetti law of February 2, 2016, which limited end-of-life intervention to deep and continuous sedation without the intention of causing death. That legislation, codified in Articles L. 1110-5-1 through L. 1110-5-3 of the Public Health Code, maintained a clear ethical boundary that the current proposal obliterates.

Hippocrates established more than a name on medical diplomas. He defined an ontological boundary: a physician cannot simultaneously fight death and administer it. Breaking this frontier does not modernize medicine but inverts it, transforming healers into executioners in white coats.

Ecological Triage and the New Malthusianism

The most vocal supporters of this legislation include environmental activists who have theorized a disturbing calculus: the Earth is overpopulated, the elderly are useless mouths to feed, and the seriously ill represent bottomless wells of expense. This represents what can only be described as Malthusianism in fluorescent green packaging.

While proponents speak of dignity and freedom to choose one’s end, what they are organizing is an ecology of sorting. Save the whales, euthanize humans whose carbon footprint becomes burdensome. It is a macabre carnival where dancers circle hospital beds transformed into ecological pyres.

Suicide Prevention With Variable Geometry

Suicide prevention should have been the guiding thread of any end-of-life legislation. Instead, the principle that merely wanting to die should not authorize killing has been sacrificed on the altar of absolute autonomy.

The Republic’s answer is clear: if you declare it loudly enough, frequently enough, and if two doctors sign off, the state will provide the means. Suicide prevention becomes a principle with variable geometry. Society saves the young depressive because he has his whole life ahead of him, but “accompanies” the elderly or terminal cancer patient because he has had his time. The state decides who deserves to be saved and who deserves to be delivered.

This is soft eugenics: no longer selection by race or gene, but by cost and by quality of life as estimated by others.

Who Will Evaluate the Evaluators?

Proponents promise psychological evaluations and safeguards: two physicians, a commission, a reflection period, serious and incurable illness affecting life prognosis, and refractory suffering. But fundamental questions remain unanswered.

Who will evaluate the evaluators? What will prevent caregiver fatigue, hospital budget pressure, or family exhaustion from influencing the diagnosis of refractory suffering? The thread that should guide this ethical labyrinth has been cut, and citizens are invited to descend while being assured the Minotaur is humanitarian.

The Shadow of History

In this morbid context, many have referenced the Nazi Aktion T4 program. While some dismiss such comparisons as forced or outrageous, the historical parallel cannot be entirely ignored. Aktion T4, launched in 1939, assassinated over seventy thousand disabled persons and mentally ill individuals deemed “lives unworthy of living” for explicitly eugenic and economic reasons.

The transformation of intentional death into a protected, regulated medical act integrated into the care pathway represents an unprecedented moment in French legislative history. The poison becomes therapy, the crime becomes service, and the boundary between healing and killing dissolves into bureaucratic procedure.

As France prepares to cross this Rubicon, the question is no longer whether death will be administered by the state, but whether a society that institutionalizes killing as care can maintain any coherent commitment to the sanctity of human life.

With information from Valeurs Actuelles