[Press Release] French Bioethics: Senate Called to Set Limits on Technical Omnipotence

By voting the bioethics bill in its’ current form, the deputies have signed the collapse of most of the ethical barriers that France allegedly held for the past 25 years. Alliance VITA calls for vigilance in the Senate to correct 3 serious injustices in this bill: allowing the right to have a child without a father, intensifying prenatal selection and increasingly using human embryos as laboratory materials.

The day following the vote, Alliance VITA will address the senators to highlight three bioethical priorities for France:

– To refuse the worldwide procreation market. Indeed giving up the infertility criterion, to allow women without a male partner to have ART and be 100% reimbursed by the state:

• creates a “right to a child” without a father, to the detriment of the child’s best interests;
• diverts medicine and health insurance funds, when the French are currently facing the delisting of many necessary drugs;
• paves the way for legalizing surrogacy, as seen by J.L.Touraine’s endeavor (as co-rapporteur of the bill) to automatically recognize children born abroad by surrogacy on French civil registration.
• To re-examine the issue of unreasonable prenatal selection which places France as the most eugenic country in the world, with medically-authorized abortion rates at almost 100% for some handicaps. Instead of assisting traumatized parents when faced with a diagnosis of disability, the current draft provides additional widespread support for abortion, despite the government’s claim of being inclusive and tolerant toward those with disabilities.

– To protect France from the creation of chimerical animal-human embryos, transgenic embryos and artificial gametes. It is up to the senators to hold firm against scientific abuse, which would lead to:

• increasingly using human embryos as laboratory materials,
• using some human beings solely for research and profit,
• wiping out the difference between men and animals.

 

Tugdual Derville, Alliance VITA’s General Delegate declares:

“This law avoids addressing two urgent issues which are, for a large number of citizens: to fight infertility and to halt this spiral of eugenics. While these subjects are eventually beginning to be discussed in the National Assembly, no texts have yet been drafted to live up to the issues at stake! In fact, the text voted tonight by the deputies constitutes a deregulation in bioethics and considers the human being as a commodity for the procreation market. Today, we are urging senators to re-examine this text, in order to promote bioethics principles which reconcile human ecology, responsible medical research and respect of the child’s best interests. In the coming days, we will also launch citizen protest initiatives to create public awareness and encourage legislators to make decisions that will protect humanity in the long-term.”