French MPs divided over ‘existential’ euthanasia bill

PARIS: A bill to legalise euthanasia was set to go before a deeply divided French parliament on Thursday, with right-wingers planning to torpedo any vote with thousands of amendments and the government not taking sides. If the draft law were to pass, France would become the fifth European Union country to decriminalise assisted suicide, after the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain.

The bill was brought by Olivier Falorni from a centrist group of MPs called Freedom and Territories, and he plans to use Thursday’s National Assembly time allotted to his party to fight for a proposal that he says raises "existential questions".

He says it would end the national "hypocrisy" of French residents travelling to Belgium or Switzerland for assistance in suicide, while he claims French doctors already secretly perform between 2,000 to 4,000 acts of euthanasia every year.