In the debate on euthanasia, who are these opponents that we hear less?

With 305 votes for and 199 against, the end of life law, adopted at first reading in the National Assembly, will be examined in the fall by the Senate and will return to deputies for a second reading. Opponents should therefore not disarm. Especially since their circle tends to widen. Until now, criticisms on this law have been carried by two groups: caregivers in palliative care, who consider that their practices allow the condemned patient to die in dignity, and believers, who invoke respect for life and the fundamental prohibition of killing.

Recently, other less known collectives have been expressing their concerns. On May 19, 2025, 600 psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts published a critical manifesto. While on May 24, 2025, disabled people gathered before the Assembly to signify their opposition to the text.

Non -religious patterns

Their arguments contrast with those usually brandished. “Religion does not come into account, I am an atheist,” confesses Dr. Raphaël Gourevitch, a Parisian psychiatrist and one of the initiators of the manifesto of “psys”. As for Odile Maurin, activist for the law of people with disabilities and historic president of Handi-Social, she presents herself as a leftist “anticlerical”, close to rebellious France, while refusing to join it, in particular because of the support of the party to this law.

A lack of safeguards

If Dr. Gourevitch opposes the text, it is because he may, according to him, vicar the relationship to his patients suffering from mental illnesses. “It is very common that they tell me their desire to commit suicide,” he says. But in the vast majority of cases, there are behind an implicit request not to suffer anymore. What patients really ask us is to be creative to find the means to relieve them. When the law is promulgated, it will force psychiatrists to take these requests in the first degree. A disaster, for this practitioner. “This law freezes the desire for death, while it is by nature fluctuating. »»

The lawyers of the law do not reassure either. It provides for a minimum two -day reflection period before the patient could confirm his wish for assisted suicide.

According to Dr. Hugo Tiercelin, psychiatrist for the elderly and signatory of the manifesto, it is a nonsense: “An acute suicidal crisis requires three days of hospitalization. Antidepressants take eight to ten weeks to act in GéRonto-Psychiatrie. It takes a month in France to get an appointment with a psychiatrist. Leaving ourselves two days is to take away our ways to act. »»

The law also stipulates that euthanasia will be refused if it is motivated by psychological suffering not engaging in the vital prognosis. It is to ignore mental illness, warns Dr. Gourevitch: “Many mental disorders actually involve the vital prognosis because there is a suicidal risk. And many are accompanied by comorbidities, physical suffering, which would put the lives of these people in danger if they stopped their treatments. Many of his patients could therefore request euthanasia if the law remained as it is.

Poorly considered disability

For his part, Odile Maurin, autistic riveted to a wheelchair due to a rare disease, fears that the growing renunciation of the public authorities with regard to disabled people will push a certain number of them to claim death. “Today, mistreatment is systemic,” she denounces. Life assistants are little or poorly trained, very poorly paid. And it is sometimes difficult to find, due to the lack of attractiveness of the profession. Odile defends disabled people who fail to obtain the number of hours of home help to which they are entitled. “It takes two years of waiting in court,” she sighs.

For the sixties, the demand for euthanasia cannot be a free choice in a society trivializing negative discourses with regard to disability. “I regularly hear people getting started:” In your place, I would have preferred to die “” in his eyes, the law on end of life is “validist”: it prioritizes lives, implying that some would be worth living, and others not. It is therefore, too in the name of the defense of human rights, that Odile Maurin says he does not want this legislation.