Last week, France’s National Assembly—the lower house of Parliament—voted 305-199 in favor of legalizing what they are calling “assisted dying.” The legislation now moves on to the Senate, where the proposal will probably become law unless the country’s Catholics and their allies take extraordinary steps to block it in the country that once held the title of “the Eldest Daughter of the Catholic Church.”
Today, France is well-known for its militant secularism. The most recent data reveals that self-declared “convinced atheists” represent almost 30 percent of the French population, and another 34 percent claim to be “not religious.” France has long been known to be among the top five most atheist countries in the world, behind only Japan, China, and the Czech Republic. The French government has encouraged this secularism through a policy known as “laicite,” which keeps religion out of all public affairs and plays a central role in its education system and public institutions.
In 2004, for example, France passed a law prohibiting students in public primary and secondary schools from wearing religious symbols—including crosses and medals of the saints.
Still, there are French lawmakers with a Catholic conscience. But will they have the kind of courage needed to mobilize against the suicide bill? The Guardian reports that France’s Prime Minister, Francois Bayrou, a devout Catholic, had said he had “questions” and “would abstain if I were an MP.”
Bayrou would have support from a growing number of Catholic constituents, as there is a “Catholic Renaissance” emerging in France. Figures released recently by the Bishops’ Conference of France announced that 10,384 adults received the sacrament of baptism at the 2025 Easter Vigil. This is an increase of 45 percent over the 7,135 adults who were baptized in 2024 and a 90 percent increase over the 5,463 adults who were baptized in 2023.
According to Eglise Catholique en France, in the past ten years, catechumens in France have increased from 3,900 in 2015 to 10,392 in 2025. This is an increase of more than 160 percent. Among the new adult catechumens, the 18–25-year-old cohort accounts for more than 42 percent of the catechumens and is surpassing the 26–40 age group. This is a dramatic change considering that in 2020, the number of 26 to 40-year-old catechumens was double the number of 18 to 25-year-olds.
Prior to the vote, the Catholic bishops held a Vigil for Life at the newly restored Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which featured a series of testimonies from individuals who offered their thoughts on the ethical and human dimensions of end-of-life care. In his homily that called on all Catholics to mobilize to defeat this growing culture of death in France, Archbishop Laurent Ulrich of Paris denounced the “illusion” of a “soft, chosen death.”
Archbishop Ulrich knows that the suicide advocates have attempted to take the high moral ground in promising a “death with dignity.” Even Emmanuel Macron, the current President of France, who was raised in a non-religious home but asked to be baptized into the Catholic Church at age 12, now appears to support the suicide legislation, saying that “there are situations you cannot humanely accept.”
Macron echoes the exaggerated claims of the “death with dignity” advocates who warn of the intractable, painful deaths that we all will face unless we accept the “kinder, gentler death” they promise. In the opening pages of their most recent publication—The Inescapable Truth—the Dignity in Dying advocates warn readers in hyperbolic terms:
Seventeen people a day will suffer when they die…people are being forced to endure unbelievable suffering at the end of life. Some will retch at the stench of their own body rotting. Some will vomit their own feces. Some will suffocate, slowly, inexorably, over several days, their last moments of life disfigured by terror.
Warnings like this characterize the marketing techniques of the pro-assisted suicide advocates. It is difficult to read about such horrors, even though we know that there is no need for such suffering in an advanced society with a plethora of ways to manage pain and provide end-of-life comfort care. No one, including those on the pro-life side who warn of the abuses of the “death with dignity” movement, would wish such suffering on anyone. But fear of the loss of control that accompanies dying has caused increasing numbers of European countries to embrace assisted suicide.
Assisted suicide has been legal in Switzerland since the 1940s. But Europe stood firmly against “aid in dying” for decades—even as the United States first began to embrace it in states including Oregon, Washington, and Vermont (eleven states have so far legalized assisted suicide). In Europe, the Netherlands and Belgium were the first to legalize both “active euthanasia” (when a caregiver induces death at the request of the patient) and assisted suicide, where doctors provide the patient with the means to end their lives themselves. The floodgates then opened as Spain allowed euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2021, and Austria legalized assisted suicide in 2022. Portugal decriminalized euthanasia in 2023, but it has not come into force because of tremendous opposition.
Last November, the UK Parliament voted for assisted suicide. The UK’s lower house provided a provision that would allow medical personnel to opt out of assisting in the suicide. It is uncertain whether that will remain. In France, there is a conscience clause for medical personnel to “opt out” of participating in assisted suicide, but the proposed legislation includes a penalty of two years in prison for anyone who attempts to block an act of assisted suicide.
Conscience protections only go so far once the death industry gains power. Like the pro-life crisis pregnancy laws in some states (which require the pro-life centers to refer women to abortion facilities), even if physicians in Canada refuse to participate in assisted suicide, they are required by law to refer their suicidally motivated patients to someone who will help them die. For Catholics, that is formal cooperation in sinful behavior.
Still, even with the fear-mongering and promises of a peaceful death, suicide remains a “hard sell.” And although progressive politicians here and abroad fill their campaign coffers with donations from the assisted suicide industry, these kinds of issues have a way of eventually making us aware of the very real consequences of assisted suicide on everyone it touches.
After he assisted in the suicide of his mother, Andrew Solomon wrote in a 1996 New Yorker article entitled “A Death of One’s Own”, that “the comfort of control that his mother exerted gave her solace” but he continued, “the fact is that a suicide is a suicide—over determined, sad and somewhat toxic to everyone it touches.” In his best-selling book, The Noonday Demon, Solomon details the ways in which his family fell apart in the aftermath of the suicide. Solomon writes that he rarely spoke with his father or his brother anymore and details the futile effort to treat his depression through a regimen of sometimes more than a dozen pills each day. Having participated in his mother’s death, Solomon admits that he, too, has viewed suicide as an option to escape his psychic pain.
Catholic theologians warn about a “culture of death,” and sociologists have long known that suicide begets suicide as a form of social contagion. But Nietzsche understood the dark pull of nothingness when he warned that “if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” We shall see if and how France responds to the gaze of this abyss.
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