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Paris, March 8 Reuters - More than 2000 French doctors and nurses have signed a petition declaring that they had helped patients suffering from incurable diseases to die and calling for the government to legalise euthanasia.
The declaration, published on Thursday in the weekly Nouvel Observateur, comes days before the trial of a doctor and a nurse charged with administering a fatal dose of potassium to a woman suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer in August, 2003.
It follows a court ruling in Italy this week that cleared an anaesthetist for removing the respirator of a muscular dystrophy patient who had described his life as torture.
The petition from 2134 medical professionals is believed to be the first such declaration in France.
"Because disease was certain to defeat medical procedures, because in spite of treatment, physical and psychological suffering had rendered the life of a patient intolerable, we medical staff, have consciously helped patients to die with decency," the petition reads.
They called for charges against Laurence Tramois, a doctor, and nurse Chantal Chanel to be dropped and urged a new law allowing active euthanasia, based on laws in Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
The petition and next week's trial are expected to reopen the debate on euthanasia just weeks before the country votes for a new president in April and May. Active euthanasia is illegal in France but a law passed in 2005 allows doctors to withhold treatment with a patient's consent under some circumstances.
Both election frontrunner Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Segolene Royal have made comments in the past suggesting they favoured allowing life to be ended to limit suffering in some circumstances, but neither has an explicit policy on euthanasia.
The Nouvel Observateur published comments from several medical professionals saying they had often helped incurably ill patients to die as a means of ending agonising suffering.
"Some forms of pain resist," it quoted Catherine D, a rural doctor, as saying. "If you have to end them by inducing death, I'll do it, even if I don't like it," she said.
"Out of respect for the person, who becomes, for a few hours, a person in their own right and not a medical object."
Opponents of euthanasia, including the Roman Catholic church, say the sanctity of life overrides all other considerations and many also say that giving doctors the right to kill their patients would be too easily open to abuse.
- REUTERS
