[Press Release] Bioethics: Where is Justice in the French State Council’s Position?

Alliance VITA takes note of the State Council’s position which is detrimental to the child’s best interests, because it concedes to some citizens’ requests regarding reproductive techniques.
When reading the possible ART bioethical changes that have been appearing in the media, it is shocking that a group responsible for counseling the government consents to demands coming from a small minority of adults, seen as transgressive, instead of assessing an infertility prevention policy, (including environmental and behavioral causes). Besides they don’t even recognize that treating ART in a trivial manner, will have an impact on children’s rights.
Tugdual Derville, Alliance VITA’s General Delegate wonders:
“These new recommendations give the impression that the group has little concern for legal coherence and justice for the most vulnerable. As if political pressure forced them to go back to the previous decisions… How can the principles which were claimed when the law was revised in 2011 to protect children, all disappear so suddenly? The State Council recommended avoiding “the risk of ceding to the least ethical position “, and to maintain “the basic requirement for a child to have a family with a father and a mother” and not to “intentionally create a child without a father, which cannot be considered to be in the best interest for the unborn child.”  Such bioethical policies based on a downhill slope can’t make our society safe. “
On a point that merits reconsideration, Alliance VITA notes that the State Council makes an absurd proposal which does not respond to individuals seeking their origins, after birth by ART from a donor, yet still confronted by the anonymity of gamete donation.  This issue is feebly addressed, by proposing access of non-identifying data, but subject to the donor and the parents consent. This is scientifically absurd and practically derisory. Nowadays, nothing can hinder one from having access to his origins.
Alliance VITA continues to insist that the main principles governing French and International law must be respected, in particular Article 7 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that every child has “the right to know his parents and be raised by them as far as possible.”
Alliance VITA intends to participate in mobilizing efforts for bills to be passed in accordance with the child’s best interests.