On Wednesday, July 15, France’s National Assembly voted 291 to 241 to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide [1]. The vote follows a years-long, often-contentious debate, in which proposed laws were repeatedly rejected by both chambers of the legislature.
The new law permits an adult to request death if he or she is a French citizen or stable legal resident, suffers from a serious and incurable illness that is advanced and life-threatening, experiences physical or psychological suffering deemed unbearable or resistant to treatment, and is judged capable of making a free and informed decision.
The law also requires that the request be reviewed by health professionals within fifteen days, followed by a reflection period of at least two days. The lethal substance may be self-administered or administered by a doctor or nurse if the patient is unable.
President Emmanuel Macron Delivers on Deadly Campaign Promise
The pressure to pass the law was relentless. As National Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet noted after the vote, the bill occasioned the Assembly’s longest debate since the 1980s.
In recent years, the French Senate rejected the measure three times. The July 15 vote was the fourth time the National Assembly voted on the bill since May 2025, and support among deputies shrank with each reading.
However, the issue was championed by President Emmanuel Macron, who promised during his 2022 campaign to open the way to legal death. And this time, he and other supporters of assisted suicide and euthanasia were able to muster the votes.
“In 2022, I made a commitment to pave this path with the French people,” he declared [2] after the vote. “That commitment has been fulfilled.” Deputies applauded the bill’s author, Olivier Falorni, who described his years-long campaign as “a marathon with hurdles.”
However, the fight is not quite over. In a surprise announcement on Bastille Day, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu – who is personally opposed to the law – said he would refer the text to the Constitutional Council, citing the disagreement between the two chambers and, above all, the law’s failure to include a conscience clause for institutions.
As written, the law would compel care facilities – including the Catholic nursing homes run by the Little Sisters of the Poor – to allow lethal injections on their premises. Senate President Gérard Larcher has announced a referral of his own.
Outside the Assembly, protesters held placards reading: “Caring = fraternity – Euthanasia = abandonment.” Alliance VITA, the country’s leading anti-euthanasia organization, called the vote [2] “a serious ethical and social rupture” that undermines suicide prevention, stigmatizes the lives of the most vulnerable, and opens the way to “divisions within families, healthcare teams and society as a whole.”
Legal Euthanasia Spreads Across Europe
If the law takes effect, France will become the fifth European nation to legalize euthanasia outright, joining the Netherlands and Belgium (2002), Luxembourg (2009), and Spain (2021) in permitting doctors to administer death directly.
A wider circle of countries [4] permits assisted suicide, in which the patient takes the lethal dose himself: Switzerland has tolerated the practice since 1942 – hence the infamous “suicide tourism” of the Dignitas Clinic – while constitutional court rulings have opened the door in Germany and Austria, and Italy’s high court has carved out narrow exceptions.
Portugal’s parliament passed a euthanasia law in 2023, though presidential vetoes and constitutional challenges have so far kept it from taking effect. The map of legal killing in Europe, in other words, spreads steadily wider – and France is the largest European nation yet to embrace euthanasia.
The French Bishops Respond
France’s bishops responded within hours, in a blunt statement [5]. “July 15, 2026, marks a serious turning point in the history of our country,” the bishops wrote [6].
Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline of Marseille, president of the bishops’ conference, lamented that “members of parliament have enshrined in French law the possibility of causing death.” “This choice,” he said, “breaks with the long tradition of care whose purpose is to alleviate suffering and accompany each person to the natural end of their life.”
As a consequence of the law, the French bishops continued,
Our relationship to vulnerability, old age, disability, and illness will change. The bond of trust between generations, as well as between caregivers, patients, and their families, will be weakened, and society’s perception of frailty will be damaged. The poorest are likely to be the first to pay the price: not wanting to be a burden on their children or grandchildren, elderly people in precarious situations may feel pressured to die.
The bishops also (rightly) noted that “Experience in other countries shows that the criteria for access to assisted dying always tend to broaden, to the detriment of palliative care.”
The bishops concluded their statement by encouraging Catholic healthcare facilities “to be faithful witnesses to the essential ethical attention to respect for fundamental human values, by refraining from behavior that is clearly morally reprehensible, in accordance with the dignity of all human life.”
The bishops pledged to “closely monitor” the referrals to the Constitutional Council, and have called on French Catholics, whatever comes, to “bear witness that another path is possible – one of faithful presence and attentive care that alleviates physical or psychological suffering, without ever abandoning anyone.”
Religious Sisters Refuse to Submit to New York Law
Meanwhile, across the pond, in New York, Catholic leaders are also standing up against a new assisted suicide law.
New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act [7], signed by Governor Kathy Hochul in February, takes effect in August, making New York one of thirteen states, plus the District of Columbia, to legalize assisted suicide.
On Friday, July 17, four orders of Catholic sisters – the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, and the Little Sisters of the Poor – joined the Diocese of Rockville Centre and other Catholic ministries in filing a federal lawsuit [8] to block the law.
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne run a 42-bed palliative care home for the dying poor. Under New York law, such facilities must counsel [12] terminally ill patients on all their “end-of-life options” – now including assisted suicide – or refer them to someone who will, on pain of fines of up to $2,000 per violation, loss of their licenses, and even jail time for willful violations.
“At our homes, we bring Christ’s unbounded love to elderly New Yorkers of every background and walk of life,” said Mother Mary Rose Heery, prioress general of the Carmelite Sisters. “We strive to bring His compassion to those entrusted to our care, ensuring that no resident ever has to die alone. This law strikes at the heart of that vocation.”
Mark Rienzi of Becket Fund, the religious liberty firm representing the Sisters, put it more bluntly [8]: “New York is forcing sick and dying people to consider suicide at their lowest moment, regardless of whether they ask for it or not. Worse, it’s conscripting the nuns who care for them into its suicide cult on pain of crushing fines and professional ruin.”
Bishop John Barres of Rockville Centre, whose diocese is a plaintiff, sounded [13] a note of defiance in a statement: “We will never submit to New York’s culture of death.”
“Assisted suicide is a grave moral failure that puts the elderly, the disabled, and those suffering from mental and emotional illness at risk of abuse and manipulation,” he said. “Christ the Divine Physician calls us to accompany the sick and dying with compassion, not abandon them to death. The court should protect that millennia-old mission.”
Legalizing Euthanasia is a Slippery Slope
The French bishops are right to be concerned that once euthanasia is legalized for “limited” cases, it will soon expand to much broader cases. On this question, the evidence is in.
Canada legalized euthanasia in 2016 for those whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable.” Ten years and more than one hundred thousand deaths later, the “strict” conditions have been expanded so far that the country is looking at allowing euthanasia and assisted suicide for patients whose sole condition is mental illness. In other words, the country is looking at helping suicide-minded people…commit suicide.
The proposal is so macabre and is so strenuously opposed by the mental health industry, that Canada’s own parliamentary committee is pleading for the brakes [14], as I wrote last month.
The Netherlands, the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia, has followed the same trajectory. When the Dutch law took effect in 2002, the public was assured that killing would be reserved for cases of “unbearable suffering” with “no prospect of improvement,” hedged about with rigorous safeguards. Within three years, Dutch doctors had adopted the Groningen Protocol, a set of guidelines under which physicians may actively end the lives of severely ill newborns.
In 2020, the Dutch Supreme Court blessed the euthanasia [15] of patients with advanced dementia who can no longer consent, provided they once signed an advance directive. The case before the court was that of a 74-year-old woman whose doctor slipped a sedative into her coffee, and who was held down by her own family when she appeared to resist the lethal injection. The doctor was cleared.
Belgium, which legalized euthanasia in 2002, ran the same course even faster. Within a decade, its doctors were euthanizing people with no terminal illness whatsoever. That included, in 2013, 45-year-old deaf twin brothers who were losing their sight, and a 44-year-old woman devastated by a series of failed “sex-change” surgeries. In 2014, Belgium became the first country in the world [16] to remove all age restrictions from its euthanasia law, and it has since euthanized children as young as nine.
The pattern does not have exceptions. No country that has legalized euthanasia has ever meaningfully narrowed its law. The “strict conditions” of year one is inevitably just a prelude to more and more death in years to come.
The numbers inevitably follow. In the Netherlands, euthanasia deaths reached 9,958 in 2024 [17] – up ten percent in a single year, and more than one in every twenty deaths in the country – while euthanasia for mental illness alone rose [18] from 88 cases in 2020 to 219 in 2024. In Belgium, officially reported euthanasia deaths have climbed [19] from 236 in the law’s first full year to 3,423 in 2023. And Canada, which did not legalize euthanasia until 2016, has already outstripped them both: more than one hundred thousand Canadians [20] have died by lethal injection in a single decade, including 16,499 in 2024 alone – 5.1 percent of all deaths in the country.
Wherever it is legalized, euthanasia does not remain rare. It becomes routine.
The Path Forward: Christlike Care
“Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church [21] teaches. “It is morally unacceptable” (no. 2277).
However, the Church never offers a prohibition, without simultaneously offering a vision that is fuller, more humane, more Christlike, more in keeping with human dignity. Two paragraphs after condemning euthanasia, the Church points to the true path: excellent quality palliative care, which the Catechism calls “a special form of disinterested charity” (no. 2279).
The real question before France, New York, and every society tempted by this false mercy is the one the French bishops posed: whether the answer to suffering is death on demand, or a society in which no one concludes that death is preferable because care, medicine, family, and community have failed them.
The answer to suffering is not death, it is to accompany the sick and dying with Christlike compassion, and by developing and applying the very best palliative care medicine.
That is the witness of the Carmelite Sisters at the bedside of the dying, and of the Little Sisters of the Poor from Paris to New York. Let us pray for them, for the judges of France’s Constitutional Council and the federal court in Albany, and above all for the sick, the elderly, and the dying whom these laws place in mortal danger.