Speakers & moderators

Véronique Fournier is a physician. From 1999 to 2002, she was an advisor to the Minister of Health Bernard Kouchner, in charge of bioethics, end-of-life issues and patients' rights. In 2002, she founded the Clinical Ethics Center of the APHP, the first French structure to offer assistance when the medical decision at the patient's bedside is blocked for ethical reasons.

Very quickly, the Center was solicited for requests to die, even though the people for whom this request was made could not legally obtain a decision. The subject inspired two books, Puisqu'il faut bien mourir in 2015 (Ed. La Découverte) and La mort est-elle un droit? in 2016 (Ed. La documentation française). In 2016, Marisol Touraine, then Minister of Health, entrusted her with the presidency of the National Center for Palliative and End-of-Life Care created in the wake of the Claeys-Léonetti law.

Her work at the Center for Clinical Ethics also led Véronique Fournier to take an interest in the difficult question of how far medicine should go when caring for the elderly. Is the threshold of unreasonable obstinacy the same for them as for younger people? Who should decide? These questions lead her to broaden her thinking about the issues, not only medical but also social, that old age raises. In 2015-2016, she co-directed a seminar with sociologist Philippe Bataille at the EHESS, entitled: vieuxetchezsoi.com, and then created an association of the same name. She then continues this reflection on what aging means and how society should adapt to the massive increase in longevity.

In December 2021, she co-founded the self-proclaimed National Council on Aging (CNaV), whose mantra is "Nothing for the elderly without the elderly": it is to demand that the policy on old age be thought out and decided with the elderly, because they are the ones primarily concerned. In March 2022, she published Who is old here? Les vieux sortent de l'ombre (Ed. Rue de Seine).