On July 27, during the extraordinary session of the French National Assembly, the second reading of the Bioethics bill was retained by the Government.
Despite the fact that France is facing urgent economical, social and ecological issues in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, this increasingly controversial bill has been squeezed into the closing hours of Parliament’s summer session, right in the midst of reshuffling the Cabinet.
Alliance VITA continues to denounce the various forms of manipulating human lives embedded in this bioethics bill:
- Systematizing prenatal diagnostic testing in order to select even greater numbers of human beings according to their genetic criteria.
- Authorizing “saviour babies” which presupposes a double pre-implant genetic screening process to produce a healthy and compatible embryo, in order to use his cells to treat a sick sibling.
- Spending Social Security finances to provide ART (assisted reproductive technology) for all women, living in pairs, or single, thereby negating the previous requirement of medically diagnosed infertility for both ART access and reimbursement. Children will thus be programmed in a deliberate absence of their father, in a complete upheaval of parentage principles.
- Producing human-animal chimeras (human embryo stem cells mixed with animal embryos)
- Manufacturing transgenic human embryos
Alliance VITA deplores that French Parliament, in its obstinacy to push through the bill, has lost its control of the revision process. Some extremely transgressive practices which the government originally refuted were finally endorsed by the MP’s in a special committee including ROPA (reception of oocytes from a partner) and PGD (pre-implant genetic diagnosis). ROPA breaks motherhood into morsels since one woman donates her eggs to be implanted in another one’s uterus, but the role of the child’s father is completely ignored. The PGD technique is used to detect chromosomal abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome, an obviously highly eugenic measure.
Caroline Roux, Alliance VITA’s Assistant General Delegate declares:
“While the health crisis has made us keenly aware that it is important to protect humanity just as much as the environment, the government persists on pushing through a law which will intensify the manipulation of human beings, with an inherent impact on future generations in defiance of any precautionary principle whatsoever. We can no longer rely on any previous rationale. In order to show our solidarity with the most vulnerable, our focus should be centered on our fellow human beings, – but not to manipulate them, nor to carry out selections, whether it be at the embryonic stage or at later stages in life. Enough is enough! Let’s stop the fiasco! The consequences of such irresponsibility will assuredly fall upon our future generations. Alliance VITA implores any MP’s who respect the values of humanity, solidarity and genuine ecology to vote against this law. “
