[Press Release] Clandestine Showroom for Reproductive Techniques (ART) Opens in Paris

To denounce the actual facts hidden behind the slogan “ART for all”, on April 17, 2018, the VITA Association has opened a “reproductive boutique» for 3 days in the passage Choiseul, a shopping street in the 2nd arrondissement in Paris. 

As successively explained by VITA’s representatives: Tugdual Derville, General Delegate; Caroline Roux, Coordinator of Listening Services and VITA’s International Director; Blanche Streb, Director of Training and Research, this latest initiative aims to prevent society from transgressing into a marketplace where the human being is considered as “a product, a custom-made commodity, that is selected and sorted, that can be bought and thrown away”.

The so-called “ART for all” that France is currently debating, aims to extend its’ access which until this point has been reserved for medically diagnosed cases of infertility. Alliance VITA demonstrates how this would shift towards a new reproductive paradigm – the right to have a child manufactured by ART- which would in a general manner lead to abysmal consequences for human dignity, and in particular for the most vulnerable human beings.  

In the aisles of this boutique one can select surrogate women, anonymous genitors, choose from a stock of gametes, and order custom-made babies.  In this manner VITA denounces:

• what has already been performed elsewhere,
• what is already happening in France, with impunity,
• and what could become legal in the future …

 

When laws don’t regulate technology, new developments continue to generate new markets and create an increased demand: for the sale of gametes, for renting women’s bellies, for “optimizing” human beings, for ordering custom-made babies, for systematic prenatal and pre-implantation testing, for babies born from 3-parent IVF, for genetically-modified embryos, for artificial gametes, self-begetting, etc.

Whether or not the reproductive market is a liberal profit-seeking business affair, – or state-controlled – in itself it thereby plants the seeds of totalitarianism and eugenics. Because individuals are being treated as objects or machinery whether it is the child, the man who produces the gametes, or the woman who produces a baby.

The French National Consultations on Bioethics demonstrate citizens’ involvement in the issues and their hostility to establishing the “right to have a child” and to the eugenics induced by the new reproductive techniques. The citizens’ response cannot be ignored by President Macron.

Alliance VITA’s covert boutique is “the last appeal to President Macron before organizing a widespread public rally”.

Since the president is the one who must ultimately decide, Alliance VITA asks that France:

• protect its principle of non-commodification of human beings and human body parts
• defend the dignity of individuals on an international level against the non-regulated ultra-liberal marketing of human beings.