France is now one step away from legalising euthanasia after Parliament passed a controversial bill addressing patients' rights to end of life care.
The bill is now awaiting approval from the Senate, which will debate the issue.
If Senate elects to pass the bill into law, the measure will require doctors to follow terminally ill patients' expressed wishes for "deep sedation" until they pass away.
According to Mail Online, the bill does not directly recommend the administration of lethal injections to end a patient's suffering. However, anti-euthanasia opponents claim that deep sedation amounts to the same thing while pro-euthanasia groups say that the bill falls short of expectations.
The medical community in France is divided over the issue as well. Some French doctors say the palliative or end-of-life care in France can also involve deep sedation, or medicating the patients until they die, or starve. Some doctors are also argue that it is more "humane" to euthanise a dying patient.
The bill comes at a time when French communities are debating a patient's right to request lethal injections to end their suffering. A case is currently pending before the European Court of Human Rights to decide on the rights of Frenchman Vincent Lambert.
Lambert is currently comatose in a hospital, but his wife and his parents are currently locked in a dispute over whether Lambert's life-support should be stopped and the Frenchman allowed to die.
Euthanasia in Europe is currently legal in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
Mail Online reported that after the legalisation of euthanasia in Belgium in 2002, the rate of Belgians choosing euthanasia to end their suffering doubled within in a six-year period. A study by the Universities of Ghent and Brussels in Belgium found that 1 in 20 terminally ill Belgians requested euthanasia in 2013 alone.
