Learning from a victory in the French Senate

2nd May 2011

Campaigners against euthanasia are to hear how a recent attempt to legalise euthanasia through the French senate was defeated.

Dr Xavier Mirabel, the president of the Alliance pour les Droits de la Vie (Alliance for the Right to Life) will be a guest speaker in the House of Lords at an event on Wednesday May 4 organised by the Resistance Campaign. He will outline how activists were able to persuade members of the Senate to reject a euthanasia Bill by 170 votes to 142 votes on January 25.

This included hundreds of pro-life activists lying on the ground as if they were dead outside of the historic Palais du Luxembourg while the figure of the Grim Reaper walked among them. The euthanasia Bill was sponsored by Jean-Pierre Godefroy (Parti Socialiste), Alain Fouché (UMP) and François Autain and Guy Fischer (Parti communiste-Parti de gauche). It would have permitted euthanasia for people with disabilities, the terminally ill and others with chronic medical conditions.

The Bill was introduced in spite of French President Nicolas Sarkozy pledging in 2008 to make the care of terminally ill people "an absolute priority", a policy which has led to the creation of 1,200 new beds for palliative care patients across the country. Opinion polls in France have found that public majorities fear the "risk of abuse" from a euthanasia law and believe that the government should instead invest in improved palliative care.

The meeting will also be addressed by Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, the convenor of Not Dead Yet UK. Lady Campbell is an agnostic and a lifelong sufferer of spinal muscular atrophy, a condition which has left her severely disabled and confined to a wheelchair. She is an outspoken opponent of assisted suicide and euthanasia. She will say that the relentless campaigns for euthanasia and assisted suicide in the UK are starting to have a "serious effect on the lives of disabled people".

"Disabled people, many of whom have progressive or terminal conditions, are becoming increasingly worried about a reform that is supposed to help them when their situation becomes unbearable," Lady Campbell will say. "Research in Holland has shown that what began as a very unusual end-of-life choice for those in the last few weeks of a terminal illness soon became a routine option for disabled people without a terminal diagnosis," she will say. "Working alongside disabled people and listening to their stories, I understand why they fear the slippery slope."

She adds: "Drafting legislation that empowers the few whilst protecting the many is, needless to say, a challenge. Disabled people know about choice and control. We know that assisted suicide is not about free choice and self-determination. The evidence from the state of Oregon shows that it undermines patient control. We cannot understand why Oregon is continuously cited as safe and working well. The number of assisted suicides there has risen fourfold in the 12 years since the law was enacted. Research indicates that as many as one in six of those who have killed themselves with the help of lethal drugs from their doctors were suffering from depression. Moreover, there is no way of knowing under the Oregon law whether, once lethal drugs have been issued, they are taken as intended – i.e. by the person concerned without anyone else’s involvement."

A spokeswoman for Alert, the anti-euthanasia pressure group that has helped to organise the event, said: "We are delighted that Dr Mirabel has agreed to come to Britain to explain how anti-euthanasia activists in France helped to prevent a terrifying euthanasia Bill from becoming law in his country. The attempt to introduce euthanasia to France once again reveals the international dimension of this iniquitous phenomenon but it also gives us the opportunity to learn valuable lessons from our friends on the Continent."