PARIS — France’s parliament gave final approval on Wednesday to a law allowing terminally ill adults to end their lives with prescribed medication, closing a legislative saga that began in 2022 with a presidential promise. The National Assembly, which has the last word, voted 291 to 241. One hurdle remains: the Constitutional Council must review the text before it can become law.
The route here explains the relief in the chamber. The Assembly first approved the bill in May 2025 by 305 votes to 199. The Senate rejected it in January this year, 181 to 122. A joint committee failed to bridge the two; the Assembly passed it again on 30 June, 295 to 232, and the Senate’s renewed refusal sent it back for Wednesday’s decisive reading. Four years, dozens of sittings, and a text its rapporteurs describe as having reached “a point of balance”.
What France has approved is narrower than its neighbours’ laws. The patient must be an adult, French or resident in France, suffering from a grave and incurable illness at an advanced or terminal stage, with pain that is intolerable and cannot be relieved, and must ask freely — twice, with a period of reflection between. People with severe psychiatric conditions or neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s are excluded. The medication is taken by the patient; only those physically unable may receive help from a doctor or nurse. A parallel law on palliative care, adopted unanimously back in 2025, travels with it.
The arguments outside the chamber were as long as the procedure inside. Supporters pointed to the French who travel to Switzerland or Belgium — if they can afford it — to die on their own terms; the right-to-die association ADMD urged deputies to grant what Dutch, Belgian, Luxembourgish, Swiss, Spanish and Portuguese citizens already have. France’s religious leaders, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist together, warned of an “anthropological rupture” and of quiet pressure on the elderly and disabled. President Macron, who promised this law in 2022 and once floated a referendum to force it through, called the first vote a step on “the path of fraternity”. Olivier Falorni, the deputy who carried the bill for years, said he was thinking of the patients who told him to keep fighting: “Many are no longer here.”
Assuming the Constitutional Council lets it stand, France will become the latest European country to turn a private, often clandestine choice into a regulated right. The debate will not end with the vote — it never does. But it will move from the Palais Bourbon to hospitals and bedrooms, which is where the people this law is written for have been waiting all along.
