A doctor is not necessarily obliged to respect the “advance directives”, by which a patient expresses his will or not to stay alive, the Constitutional Council estimated this Thursday, by validating the current legislation. The law, which establishes that the doctor can override these directives if they are “inappropriate” for the patient’s situation, is consistent with the “safeguarding of the dignity of the person” as well as his “personal freedom”, considers the Advice on your decision.
As a prelude to the citizen convention on the end of life
This decision comes at a time when end-of-life debates are returning to the public domain. President Emmanuel Macron is considering a change in the legislation, but he is handing the responsibility to a citizens’ convention due to meet from December. The Constitutional Council had seized the family of a patient, who had been in a coma since May after an accident and whose doctors considered the situation desperate.
The medical team wants to stop the care – nutrition and artificial respiration – but this decision goes against the intentions expressed by the patient in his “advance directives”. These, which consist of a document previously written and signed by the patient, are supposed to testify to her wishes in case he can no longer express a choice.
Provisions “neither imprecise nor ambiguous”
But the law provides that the medical team, after a collegiate procedure, can cancel them if they appear “not satisfied with the medical situation” of the patient. It was on the validity of this law that the Council had to decide. The latter considered that the legislator had played his part in providing such a way out for doctors, in particular because the patient cannot fully assess his situation beforehand.
The law thus aims to “guarantee the safeguarding of the dignity of people at the end of life”, considers the Constitutional Council, without directly evoking the notion of therapeutic implacability. It also judges that the law is sufficiently clear in evoking the case of directives “manifestly inappropriate” to the patient’s medical situation, while the family’s defenders considered these terms too vague. “These provisions are neither imprecise nor ambiguous”, considers the Council.
Source: BFM TV
