Following the State Council’s report, Alliance VITA challenges French President Macron to defend children’s rights which have been heretofore sidelined. In fact, the State Council intends to align with societal pressure concerning procreation instead of protecting the best interests of the child.
If French law permits this new type of filiation with 2 mothers, these children will be afflicted with a serious, definite discrimination of their civil status, without any paternal genealogy registered.
It is shocking that a group responsible for counseling the governmenton procreation subjects consents to adults transgressive demands from a small minority, instead of assessing an infertility prevention policy, (including environmental and behavioral causes). If they allow ART to be treated in a trivial manner, there will be an impact on children’s rights.
Tugdual Derville, Alliance VITA’s General Delegate states:
“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.” This is the same consternation if the State Counsel recommends allowing research on 13-day old embryos. Such bioethical policies based on a downhill slope can’t make our society safe.”
On a point which deserves adjustment, Alliance VITA notes that the Council of State makes an absurd proposal that does not meet the demands of children born by medical assistance with donor, tested by the anonymity of gamete donation and seeking of their origins. This quest is tackled on tiptoe, by a proposal for access of non-identifying data subject to the consent of the donor and the parents. It’s scientifically absurd and virtually derisory; because nowadays, nothing can hinder a child 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.
