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French lawmakers have approved a bill that would legalize assisted dying, allowing doctors to facilitate the deaths of terminally ill patients in certain circumstances. 

France’s National Assembly passed the measure in a 291-241 vote on Wednesday after years of debate.

The bill will next be referred to the country’s Constitutional Council, which will be given a month to rule on whether the legislation is in accordance with the French Constitution. It may only take effect after that review. 

Under the bill, patients would be permitted to receive lethal medication at their request if they are French or living in France on a “stable and regular basis,” above the age of 18, able to express their free and informed choice, experiencing pain that is unbearable or resistant to treatment, and suffering from an incurable, life-threatening illness in an advanced stage. They would then be able to self-administer the substance, or, in cases in which they are physically unable to take the medication themselves, a doctor would be permitted to administer it. 

French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to support assisted dying legislation during his 2022 re-election campaign. 

“In 2022, I had made the commitment to open this path with the French people. With gravity, with humility, and in full respect for our democracy, that commitment has been honored,” Macron wrote on Wednesday, announcing the bill’s adoption. “On this issue as intimate as it is grave, which touches on life, suffering, and dignity, only one approach was possible: taking the time for listening, dialogue, and debate.”

“The national representation has risen to the occasion during these debates. This has been the longest debate since the 1980s,” said National Assembly President Yael Braun-Pivet. 

If the bill is enacted, France will join several other countries around the world that have opted to legalize assisted dying, a term that encompasses both medically assisted suicide, which involves the patient taking lethal medication that was prescribed to them, and euthanasia, which involves a health care professional administering a lethal substance for a patient at their request.

More than 300 million people around the world are currently estimated to live in places with legal access to assisted dying.

Assisted dying legislation is also currently being debated in the United Kingdom, where in England and Wales a bill on the matter will be taken up by parliament in September after expiring at the end of its last session. 

Here are the countries where euthanasia, assisted suicide, or both are currently legal.  

United States

Though assisted dying is still not permitted in most of the U.S., thirteen states and Washington, D.C., have legalized it in recent years.

Oregon was the first state to allow the practice with its landmark Death With Dignity Act, which was approved by voters in 1994 and went into effect three years later, legally authorizing physicians to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill adults who are mentally competent and have a live expectancy of six months or less. 

Lawmakers in a number of other states have since looked to Oregon’s law as a blueprint, and a dozen more have opted to legalize assisted dying in some form in the ensuing decades. 

Those states include Washington, Montana, Vermont, California, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey, Maine, New Mexico, Delaware, Illinois, and New York, as well as Washington, D.C. New York’s law does not take effect until August 5 of this year, while Illinois’ becomes operational on Sept. 12. 

Canada

Assisted dying became legal in Canada in 2016 with the passage of the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) law following a Supreme Court ruling that struck down prohibitions on the practice. 

Under the 2016 law, euthanasia and assisted suicide were made available to mentally competent adults elgible for government-funded health care who have a serious and incurable illness making their natural death “reasonably foreseeable, are in an advanced state of irreversible decline, and are experiencing unbearable suffering. It has since been amended to remove the requirement of a “reasonable foreseeability of natural death” and to expand eligibility to those whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness. The latter change is set to take effect in March 2027.

Australia 

Assisted dying is legal in all six states in Australia and in the Australian Capital Territory. It is illegal in the country’s Northern Territory. 

Victoria was the first state to allow the practice, passing legislation to do so in 2017 that became operational in 2019.

New Zealand

Assisted dying is allowed in New Zealand under the End of Life Choice Act of 2019, which was approved by voters in 2020 and took effect on November 7, 2021.

Switzerland

Assisted suicide has been allowed in Switzerland since 1942. The country’s criminal code legally permits the practice for both residents and foreigners, provided that the person assisting in the death is not acting out of a “self-interested motive.”  Euthanasia, however, remains illegal in the country.

The Netherlands

Assisted suicide and euthanasia are both allowed in the Netherlands. The law permitting the practices took effect in April 2002. The country is one of very few that allows for the assisted deaths of some minors.

Belgium

Belgium allowed voluntary euthanasia with the 2002 Act on Euthanasia, which went into effect in September 2002.

A decade later, in 2014, it amended the law to permit minors to request and receive euthanasia under certain circumstances.

Luxembourg

Luxembourg legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide in March 2009 with the Law on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide. 

Grand Duke Henri refused to sign the bill over moral objections after lawmakers passed it the year prior. But the parliament amended the country’s constitution to remove a clause that required his signature to approve laws, enabling the legislation to be enacted. 

Italy

Assisted suicide is allowed in Italy under narrow circumstances, including when a person is on life support and is “afflicted by an incurable illness that gives rise to intolerable physical or psychological suffering,” under a 2019 ruling from the country’s Constitutional Court. 

Euthanasia remains illegal in Italy. 

Germany

Germany’s Constitutional Court overturned a ban on assisted suicide and recognized a constitutional right to a self-determined death. Euthanasia, however, is outlawed in the country.

Spain

Spain passed a law in March 2021 allowing assisted suicide and euthanasia, making it the fourth country in Europe to allow euthanasia, along with Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

Portugal

The Portuguese parliament passed a measure to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2023, though it has not gone into effect amid ongoing court proceedings.

Austria

Assisted suicide became legal in Austria in 2022. Euthanasia remains illegal.

Colombia

Both assisted suicide and euthanasia are permitted in Colombia. The country’s Constitutional Court ruled to allow euthanasia in 1997. Decades later, in 2022, it decriminalized medically assisted suicide as well, making Colombia the first Latin American country to do so. 

Colombia is also among the small number of countries that allow assisted dying for minors in some cases.

Ecuador 

Ecuador became the second Latin American country to decriminalize euthanasia in 2024 with a ruling from its own Constitutional Court. Assisted suicide remains illegal in the country. 

Uruguay 

Uruguay enacted a law decriminalizing euthanasia in October 2025. Assisted suicide was not permitted under the law, however.

Cuba

Cuban lawmakers voted to authorize euthanasia in December 2023, but the change has yet to take effect as the Ministry of Public Health is in the process of drafting specific regulations.. 

The law did not expressly allow for assisted suicide. 

The search for exoplanets—or worlds orbiting other stars—is astronomy’s great Easter egg hunt. It was in 1992 that professional stargazers discovered the first known exoplanet, a distant body orbiting a pulsar 2,300 light years from Earth. Since then, astronomers using both space-based and Earth-based telescopes have found more than 6,200 exoplanets scattered across the skies, leading them to conclude that there is at least one planet orbiting virtually every existing star.

The known exoplanets are something of a grab bag—some large, some small, some hot, some cold, some gaseous like Jupiter and Neptune, some rocky like Earth and Mars. For astronomers looking for extraterrestrial life, the true jackpot planet would be Earth-like: smallish and rocky, with an atmosphere, orbiting its parent star in the so-called habitable zone, that sweet thermal spot that is not too hot and not too cold, allowing water to exist in liquid form. In the 34 years exoplanets have been studied, no world that checks all of those boxes has ever been spotted—until now. 

According to a new study published in Science, just such a planet, going by the decidedly unlyrical name LHS 1140b is at last known to exist, orbiting a star a mere 48 light years from Earth—down the block by astronomical standards. If one potentially organic world is out there, countless others could be too—dramatically boosting the odds of extraterrestrial life.

How do scientists determine if a planet has the right conditions for life?

A living world, says planetary scientist Collin Cherubim of the University of Chicago, lead author of the new paper, “has got to be the right temperature to sustain liquid water on the surface, and it has to have an atmosphere to hold that water in place and to shield the surface from ionizing radiation. LHS 1140b has all three of these things. That puts it at the forefront for studying astrobiology and habitability and looking for life outside the solar system.”

LHS 1140b is actually not new to the astronomical canon. The planet was discovered in 2017 by investigators using what is known as the transit method. As a planet orbits its parent star it periodically moves in front of the star, briefly blocking a tiny bit of its light. The difference is not much—the equivalent of removing one light bulb from a board of 10,000 of them—but that’s enough for sensitive telescopes to detect. The frequency of the dip reveals how fast the planet completes one orbit, and the precise amount of light blocked reveals the planet’s diameter. In the alternative, astronomers also hunt for exoplanets using the so-called radial velocity method—looking for the tiny wobble that occurs in a star as it is tugged by the gravity of the moving planet. The degree of wobble reveals the planet’s mass.

The star LHS 1140b orbits is known as a red dwarf, a relatively small, relatively cool body with surface temperatures of 3,100°F to 5,800°F, compared to the 10,000°F heat of our own sun. About three out of every four stars in our galaxy are thought to be red dwarfs. For a planet orbiting a red dwarf to stay warm enough to sustain liquid water—and potentially life—it has to snuggle up close to the solar fires, and LHS 1140b does that, orbiting about 9 million miles from its star, about a tenth of the 93 million-mile-distance the Earth maintains from the sun. The planet is about 1.7 times the diameter of Earth and, thanks to additional calculations using the radial-velocity method, was determined to be 5.6 times our mass. It orbits its star once every 24.7 days compared to Earth’s one-year period.

What do we know about the atmosphere on planet LHS 1140b?

With the planetary size and solar distance boxes checked, the last piece of the puzzle was to search for an atmosphere—and Cherubim and his colleagues found it. They began by using a computer model Cherubim developed when he was earning his Ph.D. in Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. Factoring in all of the data known about the planet’s diameter, density, age, orbital period, and gravitational pull—which helps determine its ability to hold onto atmosphere—the computer model spit out the prediction that  LHS 1140b would have an atmosphere and ought to be leaking telltale helium into space. A very light gas that easily escapes gravity, helium could serve as a readily detectable marker of a complex atmosphere underneath. 

Cherubim and his team next checked that prediction, making direct observations of the planet using the transit method. “When the planet passes in front of the star, some of that starlight filters through the atmosphere of the planet,” Cherubim says. “If there are any molecules or atoms like helium in the planet's atmosphere, they can absorb or block very specific wavelengths of light.” Those absorption markers were present, proving that LHS 1140b indeed had a helium bleed.

An inert helium atmosphere is not the same as our dynamic, chemically interactive air blanket made principally of nitrogen and oxygen, as well as methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and more. But Cherubim believes some of that complexity may be present on LHS 1140b, beneath the helium smoke screen.

“My models do predict carbon dioxide to be the second most abundant gas, and carbon monoxide to be present, and also small amounts of O2 molecular oxygen,” says Cherubim. “From our climate modeling, we've also predicted a lot of water on this planet.” All of that, especially the water, indeed represents the basic recipe list if you’re looking to bake a biological cake.

What is the star like that planet LHS 1140b orbits?

One other potential break LHS 1140b caught concerns the star it orbits. Red dwarfs are very volatile bodies, giving off enormous amounts of X-rays and ultraviolet energy, both of which can destroy extant life or prevent it from getting started in the first place. The closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri b, which is part of a three-planet solar system circling a red dwarf 4.25 light years away, receives up to 400 times the X-ray radiation Earth does, which has all but certainly sterilized the planet. The star LHS 1140b, by contrast, is a quiet one, bathing the planet in just 10 times the X-ray energy that streams toward Earth, which would not rule out biology.

“Right now on LHS 1140B, the amount of X-ray flux would not really be threatening to life as we know it at all,” says Cherubim. 

None of that means life is actually present on LHS 1140b—or perhaps even possible given the countless chemical and thermal things that have to go right for biology to emerge. But the study does provide some tantalizing promise. There are trillions of planets at large in a universe fairly awash in organic chemistry. The odds favor at least some of them having conditions similar to that of the early Earth—including a protective atmosphere. If life could emerge here, there is no reason it couldn’t out there too.