In France, as elsewhere, there is turmoil over the unnatural. Two years after passing the law allowing single women and couples of women to obtain a child by means of PMA -- Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) – , the consequences of this practice are beginning to be felt.
Two years ago on August 2, 2021, and after more than two years of – sometimes heated – debates within parliament from 2019 to 2021, and three readings in the National Assembly and the Senate, the latest version of of the French bioethics law passed authorizing – and reimbursing! – assisted reproduction techniques for single women or same-sex couples.
Since then, requests from unmarried women and female couples have exploded, according to a report by the National Agency for Biomedicine: “Between August 2021 and December 2022, 22,800 requests for medically assisted procreation with sperm donation were filed by female couples or unmarried women, whereas before the law there were approximately 2,000 requests per year.”
Once again, we see in practice that the legislature has opened a new Pandora's box. On a purely technical level, a shortage of gametes is looming already, with incalculable and uncontrolled ethical consequences.
Indeed, this shortage is explained by the other change ratified in September 2022. Since this date, donors of gametes, whether spermatozoa or of oocytes, must agree that the children resulting from a donation can, at their majority, request access to their genetic background.
Thus, two stocks of gametes currently coexist: the first, formed when the lifting of anonymity was not mandatory, and which contained, at the end of March 2023 according to the Biomedicine Agency, 89,000 vials ( packaging of semen samples). The second stock has been built up since September 1, 2022, and contains 27,000 vials.
The date from which children conceived by PMA/ART will be able to demand to know their origin has just been set for March 31, 2025. In other words, children born via PMS/ART after this date will be able to know their biological parents, but only if they were conceived using the second stock, not from the first.
By law, the first stock is destined for destruction. But because of the shortage, the gamete donation centers are trying to transfer the vials from “former donors,” anonymous, to the centers with fewer vials, preparing an imbroglio which risks ending up regularly in front of a judge. The children could demand to know the identity of their biological father to whom anonymity had been promised.
All this is not taking into consideration the fact that a large-scale study by Scandinavian scientists, the results of which were published in September 2022, establishes a link between children born from frozen embryos and the development of certain cancers. This is a conclusion that has caused screams of protest from the promoters of the culture of death.
And we should add the results provided by various epigenetic studies, which show that the manipulations that accompany assisted reproduction lead to a constant percentage of malformations, without the number of these being yet known.
The Church has always warned that with assisted reproduction, human procreation breaks the natural act of a legitimate couple who, in the mutual gift of two people and according to God's plan, gives life to a new human being. A total act: physical, affective, spiritual which brings into play the responsibility of the couple, the structure of family life, and the destiny of the person called to be born and to merit the kingdom of heaven.
Remember that the production of a surplus of embryos has been an opportunity to justify and develop research on embryos that leads to their destruction. Thus, the unborn human being is being treated like laboratory material, in defiance of the rights of nature and the Creator.
This was also the plan of Dr. Pierre Simon, a Freemason, twice Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of France. In his book, De la vie avant tout chose [Life Above Everything] (Mazarine, 1979), he invited his readers to “change our attitude and our behavior towards life,” “by no longer seeing it as a gift from God but as material that can be managed.”
