After decades of fraught public and political debate and multiple rounds of legislative revisions, France’s lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, has passed a landmark bill establishing a legally protected right to assisted dying, subject to narrow eligibility criteria. The final vote on Wednesday split the chamber sharply, with 299 MPs backing the legislation and 241 opposing it — a result that comes after the country’s upper house, the right-leaning Senate, rejected the bill three consecutive times.
The legislation sets clear boundaries for access to assisted dying: only adult French residents living with a serious, incurable, life-threatening illness that has reached an advanced or terminal stage qualify. To be eligible, patients must also experience constant, unbearable physical or psychological suffering that cannot be relieved by ongoing treatment.
Under the bill’s terms, patients must explicitly and voluntarily state their intention to access assisted dying to a treating physician, who is required to conduct internal consultations and issue a decision within 15 days of the request being filed. After receiving approval, patients must complete a 48-hour reflection period before confirming their request, and must self-administer the lethal substance in most cases. If a patient is physically unable to self-administer, a licensed physician or nurse may carry out the step instead, and the patient’s decision must be re-verified by the attending medical professional on the day of the procedure.
Prior to the bill taking legal effect, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has announced he will refer three contentious sections of the legislation to France’s Constitutional Council, the nine-member independent body tasked with reviewing whether new laws comply with the national constitution. The three provisions under review include the 48-hour reflection period, which opponents argue is too short to allow for fully informed decision-making; the rules governing consent for patients placed under legal guardianship due to impaired decision-making capacity; and the role of palliative care-focused healthcare facilities in offering assisted dying services.
While Macron has long supported end-of-life choice legislation, the process was significantly delayed after he called snap parliamentary elections in 2024, and successive prime ministers have moved cautiously to advance the bill. Lecornu has openly acknowledged holding personal reservations about the legislation’s terms, and his office stated Wednesday that the Senate’s review process failed to adequately address both the hopes of the bill’s supporters and the concerns of its opponents.
If the Constitutional Council approves the legislation, France will become the latest European nation to decriminalize assisted dying, joining a growing bloc of countries that have formalized end-of-life choice frameworks. The Netherlands and Belgium first legalized physician-administered assisted dying for patients with unbearable incurable suffering in 2002, and multiple other European states have passed similar legislation in the years since. Switzerland has long permitted assisted suicide, provided the person assisting acts without personal motive.
The debate over assisted dying has similarly divided policymakers in the United Kingdom, where a bill to legalize the practice in England and Wales was put on hold earlier this year and is scheduled to return to parliamentary debate in September.
In France, the legislation has faced fierce opposition from the Catholic Church and segments of the medical community, and political divisions have kept the bill stalled for years, with the right-wing majority in the Senate blocking it repeatedly. Despite this political opposition, public opinion polling consistently shows a large majority of French citizens support giving terminally ill patients the choice between palliative care and assisted dying, with many critics of the status quo arguing the current system fails to address intolerable end-of-life suffering.