A forum signed by 146 medical researchers denounce the Foundation’s legal actions against research on embryos.
Is the Jérôme-Lejeune Foundation compatible with science? Scientists think not. In a text published by the newspaper The world, 146 doctors and researchers in the field of life sciences (including about thirty academics and professors at the Collège de France, and several presidents of learned societies) attack the organization and its positions which would contradict the logic scientist.
The Foundation is indeed known for its postures against abortion and prenatal diagnosis. She actively campaigns in favor of people with Down’s syndrome (care, treatment, etc.) for whom she refuses to reduce the chances of life, and expresses her opponent to the choice of women to decide to terminate their pregnancy when the fetus has Down’s syndrome. More generally, the Foundation is unfavorable to any intervention on living things.
“Handicap for research”
In particular, she launched legal proceedings against authorizations for research on the embryo. Hence the column published by these researchers, who ask the public authorities to “reconsider” the recognition of public utility granted to this Foundation when it was created in 1996, and who consider that these procedures constitute a “major handicap for research. French ”.
The signatories nevertheless welcome the action of the Jérôme-Lejeune Foundation, which has “significant resources”, “finances experimental and clinical research” and “created a medical consultation center” ensuring the care of patients “carriers. of trisomy 21 ”.
“Scientific and medical interest”
However, they deplore the activism of the structure, which “seeks to block research on the embryo and embryonic stem cells by increasing the number of procedures to have the research authorizations that the French Agency for biomedicine delivers in accordance with French legislation ”. The authors hammer it out: “This research is of undeniable scientific and medical interest for society”
The signatories also denounce the positions taken by this structure, considered “caricatural” in the medical or scientific fields, but also, “more and more often, in the social and political fields”.
Among these subjects, the forum evokes abortion, with the distribution of leaflets against abortion in schools, but also Family Planning, of which the Foundation is a detractor, or the PMA, the end of life and even ” the primary organized by Les Républicains in November 2016 ”.
.
