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Brief report
The ‘French exception’: the right to continuous deep sedation at the end of life
  1. Ruth Horn
  1. Oxford Big Data Institute, Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, Oxford, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Ruth Horn, Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, Oxford Ox3 7LF, UK; ruth.horn{at}ethox.ox.ac.uk

Abstract

In 2016, a law came into force in France granting terminally ill patients the right to continuous deep sedation (CDS) until death. This right was proposed as an alternative to euthanasia and presented as the ‘French response’ to problems at the end of life. The law draws a distinction between CDS and euthanasia and other forms of sympton control at the end of life. France is the first country in the world to legislate on CDS . This short report describes the particular context and underlying social values that led to this piece of legislation, and explores its meaning in the wider French context.

  • end-of-life
  • law
  • pain management
  • euthanasia

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2017-104484

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors The author is the only person who has contributed to the paper.

    • Funding This research was supported by the Well come Trust Society and Ethics Fellowship (100553/Z/12/Z).

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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    © Article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) 2018. All rights reserved. No commercial use is permitted unless otherwise expressly granted. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/