Hirsch: Should we reform the law on the end of life?

After months of controversy skillfully fomented by the Association for the right to die with dignity, will be officially made public Wednesday, the evaluation report of the law on patients' rights and end of life. The time for idle controversy must end.

The consultation, conducted in full transparency and with a desire to allow everyone to express their positions, now urges us to implement the Law of 22 April 2005, to translate the principles into the practices of care and provide the means necessary for a finally fit for human and social realities of the end of life. Failing that, other models will be promoted, such as Belgium, which, in a few years, a commonplace practice of euthanasia to apply to persons affected by Alzheimer's disease or psychiatric illnesses, even operating room to remove the organs for medical or scientific ...

A few days of the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the claim by some of euthanasia to end "lives unworthy of being lived," causing our values and our attitudes surprises. In defiance of the lessons of history and battles for the sick and their relatives to be recognized in their desire to finally be able to live their life in society without discrimination, this of ultimate freedom, affirmed in the appeal the death medically administered, violates the very foundations of democracy. It gives us all innocence in the excesses of an obvious barbarism.

We can not tolerate the rhetoric of some fine minds that proclaim as a victory of moral urgency decriminalize euthanasia, without spending the less attention to those more vulnerable than others, who find such arguments as an insult, a sham, the unbearable event of a rejection which revokes their very humanity. The propagandists current medically assisted suicide very exceptional commitment which, in recent years to better recognize the right of sick or disabled people, their aspirations for a quality of existence, to a position in society and to respectful care, adapted, attentive to their profound choices, their real needs. They reinforce the logic of indifference, the renunciation or abandonment and thus the relegation of our patients at the margins of the city, in a state of insecurity and chronic vagrancy, at home or in institutions as experienced places of segregation. The early issuance of a life so unworthy of their life seems preferable to the daily experience of a covert, anonymous, undifferentiated euthanasia society.

We must resist the figures imposed a culture of death with dignity, rethink and re solidarity essential to a society worth living until its conclusion. It is argued that the existence, dignity and rights of sick or disabled people are better than the discussions attempting indecent organize the management of the death of the most vulnerable among us: those for whom our obligations to the contrary are the strongest. We must give a public expression for reflection on the meaning of life, the value of fighting for life led by the sick and their relatives to preserve human existence, the meaning of a story man , Despite what the threat.

I call for a mobilization ethics: it concerns the foundations of democratic life and seeking a dynamic of shared responsibility, a commitment to those and those waiting for our society other responses that the final solution of an assisted death.