[Press Release] Alliance VITA Calls For Postponing the French Bioethics Bill

Following the announcement by the French National Assembly that the legislative process on the bioethics bill was suspended, Alliance VITA denounces the serious transgressions that the special committee has added during its second reading.

French MPs with the most transgressive viewpoints were able to persuade the bioethics committee to extend PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) to detect chromosomal abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome and to adopt the “ROPA” procedure that the government had thus far opposed. ROPA, an acronym for “Reception of Oocytes from the Partner”, is a procedure allowing two women to “share motherhood”, one woman contributing her oocytes and the other woman contributing her uterus. This procedure, which already cuts the child off from a father, breaks up motherhood into pieces, muddles filiation and will increasingly confuse any child born from such manipulations.

In addition, controversial provisions received governmental endorsement and have been reintegrated, such as:

• producing human-animal chimeras (human embryo stem cells mixed with animal embryos);
• legalizing the creation of transgenic embryos;
• authorizing the use of “saviour babies” which presupposes to implement a double screening to select healthy and compatible embryos in order to give birth to a child and afterwards use his cells to heal a sick sibling,
• abandoning the criterion of medically diagnosed infertility, to allow instead medically assisted procreation to all women, reimbursed by Social Security, thus permitting the birth of children deprived of their father, in a complete upending of parentage principles.

Tugdual Derville, Alliance VITA’s General Delegate voices his opposition:

“Without any control from the executive authority, these lamentable transgressions are hi-jacking the nation’s medical resources and public finances, without any precautionary principle, threatening unpredictable consequences on future generations. The debate on the present bioethical law must be postponed, instead of yielding to ideological pressure from a small minority. The political priority must focus on addressing the urgent economic, social and health issues of this pandemic, which we have yet to overcome. The challenge is to provide genuine protection for our most vulnerable citizens, especially the elderly, the disabled and the children.“