France still at odds over artificial insemination
The French parliament is debating the planned revision of the bioethics law at second reading this week. The draft from autumn 2019 provides for all women - and not just heterosexual spouses - to be granted the right to artificial insemination. Now the possibility of enshrining pre-implantation diagnostics in the law is also under discussion. Here too, opinions clash.
Taking advantage of the summer holidays?
Philosopher Francois-Xavier Bellamy is critical of the parliament's plans in Le Figaro:
“While the French are rightly concerned about the news on the healthcare and economy fronts, their representatives are preparing to vote on their behalf on whether to enter another world - one that, as the rapporteur of this law himself admits, will eventually replace natural reproduction with the organised selection and technological reproduction of children. ... Out of respect for democracy, the debate should be continued in September, so that the French at least know what their elected representatives want to do with the votes entrusted to them.”
Preventing suffering
The law would be a step forward, fertility specialist Catherine Rongières and law professor Estelle Naudin write in Liberation:
“Preimplantation diagnostics are not there to select the 'best' embryos or eliminate the 'worst'. Their main task is to avoid the implantation of embryos that would not be able to survive at later stages. This prevents the suffering that women and couples may experience because of repeated failures due to chromosomal abnormalities in the long and painful process of medically assisted reproduction. Only in a second step do these diagnostics also have the function of identifying anomalies that are looked for in any event at the onset of pregnancy in legal, authorised and organised prenatal diagnostics.”