[Press Release] ART and Children’s Rights: A warning from Alliance VITA

Throughout France today, Alliance VITA members staged a symbolic event to help citizens realize the risks that the “ART for all” project entail for children’s rights.

Alliance VITA’s national awareness campaign was launched simultaneously in 60 French cities at 1:00 pm on Tuesday, June 12, 2018, to warn against impetuously plunging into the reproductive business.

For the past 6 months, the French National Bioethics Consultations have been focused on “ART for all” or ” ART without a father”. Since this technique ignores children’s rights, VITA’s awareness campaign is resolved to focus on children’s rights, which are at risk.

For the event a large barcode is imprinted on a baby, sitting alone in an adult’s chair, surrounded by anonymous men and women lying on the ground, wearing white masks, and dressed in black mourning attire. The signs say: “ART: Goodbye Daddy”; “ART: Goodbye Mom”, to illustrate the unfair and immediate effect the government’s project would inflict on children.

The headline on the banner proclaims: “No ART business”, and in the presence of supporters wearing Alliance VITA T-shirts and carrying signs, the spokesman gave a speech to launch the awareness campaign.

If ART is legalized in France for reasons other than medically-diagnosed infertility, it would allow single women and female couples access to sperm donations, and thus children intentionally deprived of their father could be conceived. And there are already so many children who are suffering from their father’s absence, and so many women who are struggling to raise their children alone!

If the law is passed to allow “ART for all”, on non-discrimination grounds, male couples would claim access to surrogacy to obtain a child, which would deliberately deprive children from having a mother.

If it is admitted that there is such a thing as a right to have a child, then human procreation would be changed into a market, whether private or state controlled, which would regard men and women as producers of raw materials – oocytes, sperm, uterus – in order to conceive a child on request, and even designer babies.

The shift from “children’s rights” to “the right to a child”, would change children into products which can be bought and would take us even closer to eugenics in order to check, to sort, to validate, to eliminate this “product”, like any other products.

The International Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes the right of the child to know and be cared for by his parents in as far as possible. As a country responsible for defending human rights, France must encourage the rest of the international community to take a stand against Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism, which tends to consider human beings and their body products as commercial items.

Alliance VITA insists that if ART is legally permitted for those who do not fill the medical infertility criterion, a red boundary line would be violated. This calls for mobilizing society on a widespread basis to protect children and the best interest of the child.