France: artificial insemination for everyone?
Up to now only married heterosexual couples have been legally able to undergo artificial insemination under French law. A new bioethics bill to be debated in parliament today, Tuesday, is set to change that. It foresees that in future all women, regardless of their marital status and sexual orientation, will have access to medically assisted reproduction. Commentators say the debate is off track.
Industrial production of humans as the next step
The law isn't just about artificial insemination for homosexual couples, conservative activist Laurence Trochu warns in Le Figaro:
“The huge media hype around artificial insemination for all must not distract from what's really at stake with this third draft of the bioethics law, which also concerns research into embryos and stem cells: genetically modified babies, test-tube babies with three parents, part-animal, part-human chimeras, the creation of gametes. ... So the bioethics law must be rejected in its entirety. ... The 2019 bill threatens to usher in an era of industrial production of humans and the modification of the human gene pool.”
Reproduction has long been "unnatural"
Philosopher Paul B. Preciado argues in Le Soir that the debate over artificial insemination is too narrow in perspective:
“When I talk of 'reproduction technologies', for example, I'm not talking about artificial insemination at all. In fact we must view the entire history of reproduction as a history of techniques for assisted conception. The family order that strictly separated women from political life and confined them to the domestic sphere is itself such a technique. But it is so embedded in our way of life that we feel like we're attacking 'nature' itself.”