Pro-Life News in Brief.(News Briefs)(Brief Article)

French Health Minister Admits to Euthanasia

The debate in Europe over euthanasia has spread to France, as Health Minister Bernard Kouchner told a Netherlands newspaper that he injected patients with fatal doses of morphine in wartime Vietnam and Lebanon.

"I have practiced euthanasia on several different occasions," Kouchner told Vrij Nederland. "When people were suffering too much and I knew they were going to die, I helped them. I gave injections to people, never pills, injections with lots of morphine."

Kouchner is one of the founder of Doctors without Borders, which sends doctors worldwide to help in war-torn or disaster areas.

Kouchner said his actions were different from the physician-assisted deaths of terminally ill patients that are now legal in the Netherlands. "This was not at all euthanasia in the sense of death as a choice, a deliberate death, a life taken ... at the patient's request," he said in an interview on French radio, according to Reuters.

When Kouchner took office in April, he spoke about beginning a debate in France about euthanasia, Reuters reported. But he denied that there are any current plans for legalization. "There is no question of legislating for the moment," Kouchner said, according to Reuters. "One must actually protect the ill."

However, Kouchner also left open the possibility of allowing some forms of euthanasia. "Euthanasia contradicts medical ethics. Doctors exist to protect life, not to end it," he told Vrij Nederland. "But if someone says he wants to die, society has to take that into account."