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Raphaël Enthoven, Pierre Juston: "Why we are in favor of euthanasia"

2023-01-02T16:58:46.471Z


FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE - Raphaël Enthoven, philosopher and essayist, and Pierre Juston, jurist and delegate of the ADMD, respond to the column by the essayist Erwan Le Morhedec published in FigaroVox, who accused them of discrediting the voice of Christians in the debate on the end of life.


Raphaël Enthoven is an associate professor of philosophy, essayist and writer, and columnist at Franc Tireur.

Pierre Juston is a lawyer and delegate of the ADMD (Association for the right to die with dignity) for Haute-Garonne and Gers.

The contemporary debate is such that the winner is no longer the one whose arguments prevail, but the one whose injuries affect the most people.

Redemptive pain has been replaced by public complaint, which has the advantage of being effective here below.

If the frog disguises itself as an ox, it is no longer to impress the opponent, but to receive more arrows than him.

Thus our interlocutor, the essayist Erwan Le Morhedec, who, acting as the spokesperson for all Christians (while the majority of them today are in favor of active assistance in dying), s felt directly targeted by the platform where, with Elisabeth Badinter, Caroline Fourest, Jean-Marc Schiappa,

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Allow us, first of all, at the risk of depriving our San Sebastian of a few arrows, to clear up a misunderstanding: the objective of this text is not, as he says, "

to discredit in advance the oppositions by rejecting citizens from the social body

 ” in the name of their “

religious convictions

 ”.

We are not "cathophobic" McCarthyists who see in the French of such a confession a "

threat to the institutions

 and which deliver the Christians, as the "Reds" were delivered up to popular condemnation.

Everyone believes what they want.

Everyone brings to the debate the fruit of their beliefs.

In a pluralistic universe, the limit to debate is not religious conviction, but sectarianism.

Or fundamentalism.

The risk of sedition does not lie in the peaceful expression of beliefs in virtue of which voluntary death appears to be a crime.

But in the curses, which no longer have anything peaceful, that the supporters of the opposing thesis receive.

Therein lies the danger.

The danger lies in the words of Michel Aupetit, former archbishop of Paris, for example, who writes that it is “

under the pretext of false compassion

 ” that doctors practice euthanasia or abortion

.

In the threats that doctors receive, in the insults and execrations to which a vindictive minority indulges (which does not care to be a minority since it is certain to hold the truth).

In the moral magisterium that the “defenders of life” attribute to themselves to the point of holding their adversaries for supporters of “decadence”.

In the words of the prelate Michel Viot who compares voluntary death to murder.

In the medieval feeling that the law of God is opposable to the law of men, culminating in the erection of

red line

” (but which one?) which would be “

crossed with active assistance in dying

” according to Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, President of the Conference of Bishops of France.

Once again, the danger is not the debate, but the exorbitant right, incongruous in the Republic and completely inopportune, that certain representatives of the Church give themselves, in this debate, to fix the borders themselves. and the lines not to cross.

The "rare aggressiveness" that touches Monsieur Le Morhedec so much is that of fellow citizens who, having torn themselves at the price of blood from the tutelage of the Church for more than a century, do not want the representatives of what is not is now that a civil and private association once again takes itself for legislators.

We can understand it.

Read alsoEnd of life: the call for palliative care volunteers

May your mother be reassured nevertheless (and God preserve her!), Mr Le Morhedec, you are not threatening the institutions, quite the contrary.

You enjoy it fully and participate in it as a simple citizen, often moreover with intelligence, sometimes also with bad faith, but always, whether you like it or not, within a framework that your beliefs do not fix.

In any case, your platform opens the debate instead of closing it, and gives us the opportunity to get to the point: “

Legalizing euthanasia,

you say,

will not be a law of freedom

.

And for what reason, please?

Because according to you, “

freedom is established.

No offense to libertarians, it is very often the prohibition that guarantees it.

 So far so good, we agree.

Who would dispute that?

Who would dispute that, as Lacordaire says, “

between the strong and the weak, between the rich and the poor, between the master and the servant, it is freedom that oppresses and the law that frees

”?

The problem is that you drift imperceptibly from the commonly held evidence that the law protects the freedom (of the employee or the consumer) to the quite different idea that "

at the end of life, it is prohibition which restored the freedom of this patient suffering from ALS whom his palliative care doctor logically refused to euthanize, while drawing from his commitment the resources of medical creativity necessary to offer him eighteen months of end of peaceful life.

 In other words, you put on the same level the law which prohibits, for example, to mistreat an employee, and the refusal to grant the wish to die of an individual (which respects the conditions of access to such a right) .

However, if the law protects the employee, it is because it also gives him rights.

In the case of the refusal to assist in dying, it is, on the contrary, a right that is still not granted.

The two are not comparable.

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In matters of active assistance in dying, you deny to those who wish to end death (under the conditions set by law) the fact that their wish is the expression of their "freedom", because the wish to die cannot, in your eyes, to express a freedom.

Before we examine why you say so, let's dwell on this point: "freedom" does not depend on the wishes that it implements.

No one is (in the eyes of the law) more or less free depending on whether he chooses to smoke, to have an abortion or to end his life.

The freedom we have does not depend on the good or bad use we make of it.

The “freedom” that the law guarantees is not about the nature of our desires, but about the rights we have.

Besides the delicate questions of the

abuse of rights and the conciliation of rights by the judge in case of conflict, the use (deleterious or not according to you) that we make of our freedom is not the business of the liberal framework of our rights.

That we are determined to want to die (by the circumstances, the reception conditions or the state of progress of an illness) does not remove any freedom from the decision of the dying person.

Even when we no longer have a choice, we can still choose that.

Reducing the wish to die to the lack of palliative care, the inadequacy of reception facilities or the lack of staff, and considering, consequently, that it would be enough to remedy all of this so that no patient, ever, does not express the wish to advance the hour of his death, it is to confuse the explanation and the excuse.

Raphael Enthoven and Pierre Juston

Let's go further and come to the reasons why you dispute that we can "freely" want to end our lives, or that we can be helped to do so.

We do not believe that you are betraying your thinking by saying that your reasoning is the following: if we invested more in palliative care, so many people who only see death as the way out of their pain would only want to live again.

In short, the system deprives everyone of dying in acceptable conditions, before calling the request to end it "freedom", for lack of anything better.

Is that what you think?

Unfortunately (for you), this reasoning is three times wrong.

1) Even if the fight against pain is a sacred cause, even if the helpers are saints and even if we will never give enough to the institutions that accompany the dying, it happens, alas, that it is not the lack of care palliatives that makes people want to die, but the disease itself.

Because the pain of being a prisoner of his body is not always soluble in morphine.

One does not cure the despair of being aphasic or impotent with kindness.

No light coming from another makes the desire to live in those who are the shadow of themselves.

It is moreover at this moment that many Christians, abjuring their faith, suddenly become Romans and take action.

When they can afford it.

Because if we are equal before the fact of dying,

we are not before the right to receive death.

Under the current legislation, where French law condemns the condemned (when he can) to die elsewhere than at home, it is a bourgeois privilege.

There is no difference, from this point of view, between the opponents of euthanasia who change their minds for themselves when they can't take it anymore, and the opponents of abortion who go modestly to see women of angels, before the Veil law put it right.

2) To reduce the wish to die to the lack of palliative care, the insufficiency of reception facilities or the lack of personnel, and to consider, consequently, that it would be enough to remedy all this so that no patient, never, expresses the wish to advance the hour of his death, it is to confuse the explanation and the excuse.

It is to act as if a decision were reducible to the set of determinations that precede it.

However, the sovereignty and the responsibility of a decision, whatever it is, are not soluble in the causes that one finds for it (or that it gives itself).

An individual who decides to end his life may well be forced to wish so, the choice he makes is a matter of his freedom.

Better: it's all the freedom he has left!

If this gesture does not

Read alsoEuthanasia, lack of caregivers... First agreements and disagreements at the Citizens' Convention on the end of life

3) Finally, you oppose “palliative care” and “assisted dying”, whereas the two go hand in hand.

How to grant the right to end it without increasing the means to accompany those who do not make this choice?

How to decide, in conscience, to put an end to one's sufferings, without having learned of the means of alleviating them?

If the equivalent of the Veil law in terms of abortion remains to be designed in terms of active assistance in dying, such a thing is unthinkable without a real plan for financing palliative care.

A comprehensive law grants everyone the possibility of following a path of palliative care.

Or to stop doing it and to access assisted suicide, as in 50% of cases in Belgium.

The difference between you and us is not a difference between the "culture of death" and the "defence of life", it is the difference between fighting, like us, for the choice of all according to everyone's conscience, and the fact of fighting, like you, so that your idea of ​​Good prevails over the freedom of others.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2023-01-02

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