The French President has again postponed legislation to enable ‘assisted dying’ and euthanasia in France and will instead pursue a bill to radically improve palliative care.

On Monday, Emmanuel Macron received religious representatives at the Élysée Palace for the traditional New Year’s greetings ceremony. He announced two separate legislative processes, one for developing a palliative care plan by 2034, and a second, separate one paving the way for euthanasia and assisted suicide: “I have decided to present the ten-year palliative care strategy first, in the coming weeks, before presenting the principle of a forthcoming law.” In so doing, he is responding to a request made by Christian and Jewish leaders. He did not announce any timetable for the euthanasia law.

For pro-euthanasia campaigners, this is an unacceptable step backward, as their intention was to obtain a single law uniting the issues of euthanasia and end-of-life support. Pro-life associations had denounced this idea as a dangerous amalgamation: palliative care and active assistance in dying are not part of the same mentality and putting them together in a legislative project would inevitably have led to palliative care being sidelined in favour of euthanasia.