What happened:
France's National Assembly approved its assisted dying bill on June 30 by 295–232, overriding the Senate's January rejection. The law creates a right to assisted dying for adults with grave incurable illnesses in an advanced or terminal phase causing intolerable, untreatable suffering. Psychological suffering alone is excluded. Only patients physically unable to self-administer may have a clinician administer the lethal substance. National Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet called the vote "the culmination of several years of work." The bill now returns to the Senate; if the two chambers cannot agree again, the National Assembly may override permanently. Separately, on June 29, Dr. Ramona Coelho, who is a family physician, adjunct professor at Western University's Schulich School of Medicine, and former member of Ontario's MAID Death Review Committee, published an analysis in the Globe and Mail documenting systemic failures inside Canada's existing MAID framework. She documented: a 45-year-old man whose MAID assessment occurred outside a Tim Hortons after a psychiatrist raised the option unprompted, with mental illness and addiction largely untreated; a woman with severe obesity and depression approved after refusing treatment, with "neglect interpreted as irremediability"; a man in his 70s with essential tremor approved primarily due to spousal bereavement. Ontario Track 2 data (the MAID track for those not imminently dying) shows nearly 30% of recipients were living in poverty, with most not offered mental health, disability, housing, or income supports before approval.
On the source:
The French bill text and vote count come from Euronews reporting on the June 30 National Assembly session, sourced to the Assembly's own vote record and rapporteur Philippe Vigier's statement. The Canada data comes from Dr. Coelho's Globe and Mail analysis, published June 29, and is a former insider of Ontario's official MAID Death Review Committee. The Ontario Track 2 statistics are from the Committee's own data.
The pattern:
This is a disorder of Body — Euthanasia/MAID signal across two Catholic-heritage nations at different points on the same trajectory. The MDI Euthanasia tier distinguishes between active euthanasia for terminal physical illness (the French bill as written) and active euthanasia for non-terminal conditions (Canada's Track 2, which the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has called for repealing). France is entering a legal regime that Canada entered in 2016. What Dr. Coelho documents is what the endpoint of that regime looks like ten years in: poverty and isolation functioning as clinical eligibility criteria, and the system not designed to distinguish between a reasoned death request and structural abandonment.
Why it matters:
Canada legalized MAID as an exemption to homicide. France is about to do the same. The question the Canadian data forces onto the French debate is operational and no longer philosophical: when a system cannot reliably distinguish irremediability from lack of support, what is it actually doing? Dr. Coelho's answer: "The least we owe Canadians is a law that makes wrongful deaths harder, not easier."
The numbers:
France MDI Score: 40.16 High
World Rank: 49 of 195
Body Sub-dim: 37.7
Body Lead Drivers: Very high out-of-wedlock births
Canada MDI Score: 34.62 Elevated
World Rank: 123 of 195
Body Sub-dim: 38.2
Body Lead Drivers: High alcohol disorder rates
Primary source:
Euronews, June 30, 2026 — euronews.com / Dr. Ramona Coelho, Globe and Mail via National Right to Life, June 29, 2026 — nrlc.org