In a column published in Le Figaro, Laurent Wauquiez and four other executives of the Les Républicains party come out against the extension of medically assisted procreation (PMA) to single women and female couples, denouncing an “injunction to perpetual motion”.
This is called a focus. A few days after the publication by four LR deputies of a pro-PMA forum in the columns of World, the leading team of the Republicans has apparently wanted to set the record straight. In a column published on November 2 in Le FigaroLaurent Wauquiez and four other executives of the Les Républicains* party laid down their opposition to the opening of the PMA in black and white.
Entitled “Why Republicans will oppose fatherless PMA”, the column takes the government’s arguments for the extension of medically assisted procreation (PMA) to single women and female couples upside down. Worried about the risk of denying “the role and representation of the father in the education of the child”, the authors brocade an “injunction to perpetual motion” and an “unlimited extension of the market domain”.
The risk of “eugenic drift”
“As well intentioned as it is, this project opens the way to abuses that must be measured with lucidity”, write the signatories, who underline the risk of seeing the French sperm donation system circumvented in practice. A “eugenic drift” as evidenced, according to them, by the case of Cryos: this sperm bank, based in Denmark, makes it possible to select a donor from a catalog, according to criteria such as height, eye color, psychological profile or the profession.
“We collectively have the task of rediscovering the meaning of limits by forging an ecology of rootedness, concerned with human beings”, conclude the leaders of the opposition right. Currently, assisted reproduction – involved in 1 in 30 births – is reserved for infertile male-female couples. Seized by the government on this point, the National Consultative Ethics Council (CCNE) pronounced last september in favor of extending the procedure to single women and female couples, in the form of artificial insemination with sperm donation (AID).
A positive but nuanced opinion from CCNE
While considering that the opening of the PMA “profoundly modifies the child’s relationship to his family environment, in terms of family landmarks, absence of father, institutionalized ab-initio“, the committee of wise men considered it possible to change bioethical laws, so as to take into account the suffering induced by infertility resulting from personal choices. A decision motivated by the recognition of “the autonomy of women” and the evolution of family structures.
CCNE’s opinion was nevertheless accompanied by major reservations, concerning the absence of the father, the future of children from single-parent families (in the case of single women) and the risk of “commodification of the human body” linked to the shortage of gametes. The French system of sperm donation, anonymous and free, is already not enough to meet current demand, hence the waiting lists of several months for infertile couples.
Government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux reacted in a tweet, confining himself to remarking that the tribune had been written by five men. The PMA extension project will be examined in Parliament in the first quarter of 2019.
* Laurent Wauquiez, president of the Les Républicains party, Christian Jacob, president of the LR group in the Assembly, Bruno Retailleau, president of the LR group in the Senate, Franck Proust, leader of the LR deputies in the European Parliament, and Jean Leonetti, president of the national council of LR.
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