Euthanasia: the Right to Die Association Exposed

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The Association for the Right to Die with Dignity (ADMD) is proud—and rightly so—to have sparked the debate on euthanasia and assisted suicide in France, and to have successfully imposed its ideas and even its vocabulary. It has the ear of the government and influences parliamentarians; understanding its thinking is therefore essential to understanding the debate on euthanasia. The bill adopted by the Social Affairs Committee on May 2, 2025, even provides for a role for the ADMD in ensuring its implementation. It is therefore imperative to publicly expose the radical ideology and strategy of this organization.

The ADMD's double discourse

While the ADMD currently limits itself to calling for the legalization of voluntary euthanasia for sick adults, its current restraint on euthanasia for minors, disabled people, and the elderly is purely strategic and amounts to double discourse.

When asked during the 2022 ADMD General Assembly about the advisability of “going further” than the bill under discussion at the time and calling for the extension of euthanasia to minors, the elderly, and people suffering from Alzheimer's disease, Jean-Luc Romero, the ADMD's iconic president until 2021, replied that there was an internal debate on the issue but that the association “did not wish to go further, saying, strategically, that this was not the right time.” The important thing, he said, was to get the “foundation” of the law authorizing the principle of euthanasia passed. Later, in a second phase, “as the Belgians have improved their text, we will improve ours.” Belgium has, in fact, greatly expanded access to euthanasia for minors and people suffering from depression since the initial law was passed. The ADMD's restraint is therefore simply a strategy to avoid “waving a red flag” at opponents, in the words of Jean-Luc Romero, who adds that if his bill does not pass, then another proposal will have to be considered, “and then, perhaps, be ten times more radical.”

Freemason MP Jean-Louis Touraine, author of a bill to legalize euthanasia in 2017 and a regular guest of the ADMD, explicitly shared this strategy during a meeting with the pro-euthanasia association Le Choix on November 30, 2024[1]: "Once we've got our foot in the door, we'll have to come back every year and say, ‘We want to extend this.’ [...] In the first law, there won't be minors, there won't be psychiatric illnesses, in the first law, there won't even be Alzheimer's disease. So all that won't come right away. But once we have at least one law [...] we can expand things [...] we will have to introduce this equality, but I think it will be an important fight and that we will have to continue when the law is implemented."

The current president of the ADMD, Jonathan Denis, says much the same when he writes in 2022: "As the law legalizing voluntary termination of pregnancy, as passed in 1975, was very incomplete, we must fear that the law that will be put to a vote in Parliament in 2023, as we are told, will not meet all of our demands [...]. We will have to accept concessions that will only be temporary and transitional.

Because once the very principle of active assistance has been voted in, the anti-choice front will have been broken and we will finally be able to move forward quickly and change the law to what we all want: a law of free choice that does not impose any obligation on anyone."[2] This kind of double talk is nothing new for the ADMD.

Back in 1985, Paul Chauvet, president of the ADMD, wrote: “We must therefore always move forward on two fronts: that of what is acceptable today, and that of the affirmed, confirmed ideal we are seeking, in order to advance our cause.” The ADMD seeks to reassure and hide the radical nature of its ideology.

The radicalism of the ADMD

A search of the ADMD Bulletins reveals the radical nature of this organization. Its position on forced euthanasia was debated again in 1988, when the association's board proposed amending its statutes to explicitly state that it “opposes euthanasia that is not the expression of a free and informed decision by the person concerned.” The aim was to put an end to any ambiguity on the issue. Modestly, the association's next bulletin stated that this proposal had caused considerable difficulties and had ultimately been rejected[4].

Admittedly, the ADMD later declared its opposition to “any euthanasia practiced without the request of the person concerned,” but while supporting people prosecuted for euthanizing patients without their consent. This was the case in the 1980s, when the ADMD welcomed the acquittal of Pierre Thébault, a nurse who killed an 86-year-old woman with a fractured femur[5], and again in 2013 when the ADMD supported Dr. Bonnemaison, who was prosecuted for poisoning seven patients who were unable to express their wishes[6].

The practice of forced euthanasia finds theoretical justification in the concept of human dignity espoused by the founders and historical leaders of the ADMD. The fact that this association today insists on the importance of the principle of individual autonomy is not contradictory to forced euthanasia, because the principle of respect for individual autonomy stems from the conviction that dignity lies in self-control, consciousness, and individual will. Therefore, death would be preferable to the “indignity” of losing autonomy. In its Bulletin, ADMD leaders quote Nietzsche: “One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live with pride[7].” It is true that the ADMD's highest ideal is not the euthanasia of dying or unconscious people, but the voluntary suicide of people who fear wasting away. For Odette Thibault, theorist and co-founder of the ADMD, suicide “is the only way to die... alive,”[8] it is “the supreme autonomy, that which defines the human being... before it is lost altogether.”[9] As for Senator Henri Caillavet, a former president of the ADMD, “conscious suicide is the only authentic act of human freedom[10].” This apology for suicide as an act of freedom is expressed in counterpoint to an equally extreme fear of physical decline and dependence. For Caillavet, "When we are dead inside, why keep a flickering flame that allows only a vegetative existence, if not one close to senility? Is it living to no longer be autonomous, to depend on others, to no longer be able to integrate the outside world, and to sometimes be subjected to illusory life-prolonging treatment? Certainly not[11].“

From this point of view, a being deprived of autonomy and relational capacities would not be, or would no longer be, truly human; they would have lost all dignity. As Odette Thibault writes, ”Any individual who no longer possesses these faculties can be considered in a subhuman or infrahuman state, taken to the extreme in the case of the profoundly mentally disabled^[12]." Therefore, she adds, “many individuals are living dead, already dead to humanity long before the end of their organic life^[13].” Killing them would therefore not be murder, since they are already dead to humanity; and it would not violate their individual autonomy since they are deprived of it.

Odette Thibault goes so far as to write: “Prolonging this decline is, in my opinion, one of the most serious attacks on human dignity^[14].”

In addition to these arguments about the indignity and inhumanity of the end of life, there are economic considerations about the social burden of disabled and senile people. Odette Thibault wrote further about the elderly: “As soon as they are useless, or represent an additional burden, as is the case in times of scarcity, we are happy to see them disappear[15].”  Another long-standing administrator of the ADMD, Albert Cuniberti, adds in the association's newsletter: “The determination to preserve a derisory caricature of life for a growing number of elderly people who do not want it is becoming increasingly expensive and is becoming an increasingly unbearable burden on society.”[16]

Such quotes give an idea of what a “ten times more radical” bill from the ADMD might look like, as well as the “slippery slope” down which this lobby wants to push French society.

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[1] Jean-Louis Touraine, Live public conferences and debates: Le Choix - Citoyens pour une mort choisie (The Choice - Citizens for a chosen death) - November 30, 2024, Speech at 3:50 a.m.

[2] Letter from the ADMD, September 27, 2022.

[3] Paul Chauvet, Moral and policy report for the General Assembly of June 15, 1985, ADMD Bulletin, No. 17, April 1985, pp. 5-13.

[4] ADMD Bulletins, Nos. 29 and 30, 1988.

[5] ADMD Bulletin, no. 18, October 1985, p. 21.

[6] Euthanasia: Dr. Bonnemaison struck off the medical register - Gènéthique, January 28, 2013.

[7] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Hémery, Gallimard, 1974, p. 129, reproduced in ADMD Bulletin No. 26, December 1987, p. 19.

[8] Odette Thibault, "Should the law be changed?

Why I wrote my living will,“ Bulletin de l'ADMD. No. 12, October 1983, p. 20.

[9] Odette Thibault, ”Dying à la carte – I had a dream...," Bulletin de l'ADMD No. 24, June 1987, p. 13.

[10] Caillavet, Euthanasia, a word that should not frighten us, ADMD Bulletin, No. 24, June 1987, p. 6 et seq.

[11] ADMD Bulletin, No. 26. Dec. 87, p. 3.

[12] Odette Thibault, La maitrise de la mort, Editions universitaires, 1975, p. 163.

[13] Odette Thibault, La maitrise de la mort, Editions universitaires, 1975, p. 78.

[14] O. Thibault, La maitrise de la mort, Editions universitaires. 1975, p. 196.

[15] La maitrise de la mort (Editions universitaires. 1975. 224 pages), p. 79-80.

[16] Albert Cuniberti, Réflexion d'un septuagénaire sur la vieillesse, la mort, et sur l'A.D.M.D. (Reflections of a septuagenarian on old age, death, and the ADMD); ADMD Bulletin No. 25, September 1987, pp. 32–35.