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Bioethic information and analysis newsletter

Following Letter

N°73 - January 2006

Pr. Sureau, ex-president of the French National Academy of Medicine and member of National Consultative Ethics Committee, published a book on the status of the embryo named His name is nobody. The trap of its proposals must not be forgotten even though the book did not stir up a lot of response in the Medias.

Respecting the embryo?
About the affair of dead foetuses found at the Saint Vincent de Paul Hospital, Claude Sureau said above all how shocked he was by the offhandedness that affects the foetuses and living embryos.
Likewise, he understands the parents who are faced with the involuntary homicide of the foetus without being able to prosecute the person since the turn of jurisprudence of the Court of cassation.
Then he is indignant about a justice decision that, after a power failure responsible for the loss of more than 500 frozen embryos, did recognize neither the death of persons nor the destruction of objects belonging to the parents.
Finally he regrets the prohibition of posthumous transfer of embryos, obtained by fertilization in vitro when the parents are alive, when the widower asks for it, etc. And, gradually, by light strokes, the reader feels almost gained by the force of Mr Sureau’s arguments …

Enigmatic variations
However, everything collapses a little bit further when Pr. Sureau approves the therapeutic cloning pretending to think that the embryos obtained this way have less value than those obtained with an oocyte and a spermatozoid. And as the French law authorises the research on supernumerary embryos which “are indisputably human embryos", all the more so does it has to authorise cloning, he shows. In comparison, the cloning is considered to be a transgression less violent than the sacrifice of supernumerary embryos. We remind that Pr. Sureau militated to obtain the research on frozen embryos during the examination of the law on bioethics of 2004. Once this victory acquired (by the vote of the law), for him would the embryo become a respectable human being? Above all this allows justifying the production of human clones renamed cell artefacts.
Another Mr Sureau’s wish: to authorise a research likely to undermine the embryo to then transfer it to the uterus in order to study its development. This proposal has only one aim: to improve the results of fertilization in vitro and not to cure ill embryos. But then the real prenatal medicine does not care about these statistical concerns. And as for saying that we shall take the risks to kill the patient in order to cure him better, except for physicians in Moliere’s time, we cannot see clearly who can be convinced nowadays.

An animal status for the embryo
Thus we come to the astounding revelation of the book. The author, in a chapter of conclusion called “The paradox of the young dog“, proposes nothing less than to give to the human embryo the status of animal. Since the Roman law, we thought that man was a baby of the man. Based on this report –certainly hasty- a summa divisio distinguished two categories of beings: the persons we must respect, and the things we can have. But since Pr Sureau there are not only the persons and the things. There would be the persons, the things and… the raccoons of which we belonged to in our extreme youth.

An infrahuman status
The allegiance he thinks he has to renew to the French Veil law, “law beneficial for public health”, does not leave a lot of doubt about the sincerity of his enthusiasm to give a protective status to the prenatal being.
All those who would be ready -by generosity and with all the best intentions in the world- to give a status to the embryo, have to understand the stake. By definition, any proposal to give a status to the embryo can only lead to give an infrahuman status. Mr Sureau’s proposal is doubly suspicious. First because obviously the animal status will protect even less the embryo than the human being status it has since the Roman law, even if the judges do not always apply it. Then, because today the law does not authorise absolutely everything. Despite everything it remains protective. But then, a law that would “animalise” the embryo would allow justifying a complete availability of the embryo, even the authorisation to create embryos by cloning. This is the law Claude Sureau suggests.

C. Sureau, Son nom est personne - Avant de naître l'enfant est-il une chose, un amas de cellules ou un patient ? - Ed. Albin Michel, 2005.

The silent slaughter of female foetuses

100 million in the world
The medical journal The Lancet¹ has just published a study on India’s girl deficit. Prabhat Jha’s team (university of Toronto, Canada) and Rajesh Kumar’s team (university of Shandigahr, India) have carried out, in 1998, a census in India on 1.1 million families. They studied the ratio between male births and female births for more than 133,700 births that occurs in 1997. This way over the past 20 years, 10 million female foetuses would have been victims of abortion. This figure rises by 100 million in the world, if we add China, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Korea, which have to face the same phenomenon. In Occident, between 1997 and 2002 103 to 106 boys were born for every 100 girls. In India, over the same period the sex ratio has moved down from 899 to 892 girls for every 1,000 boys. In families where the preceding child was a girl, the ratio of girls to boys for the next birth was 759 to 1,000. In families where the two preceding children were girls, the ratio of girls to boys in the next birth dipped even lower: 719 to 1,000. In India, in children under the age of six, we count 927 girls for every 1,000 boys.

200 millions in 2025
Jean-Claude Chesnais, demographer, economist and research director for the INED (French National Institute for Demographic Studies), explains in Le Monde², that the distribution between men and women could change in some parts of the world with the medical techniques. With the absence of discrimination the number of women is higher by about 5% that of men. If the trend observed in some countries becomes widespread, it is not excluded that the deficit of women will reach 200 million in 2025 on the planet.

Ultrasounds / abortion Package deal

Since 1994, in India it is prohibited to carry out prenatal examinations to know the sex of the foetus and to have an abortion on this sole criterion but this law “is often ignored”. In this country, it is frequent that a woman aborts 5 or 6 times until having a boy. In Delhi, over 6 months 4,000 foetuses were eliminated.

It is a "silent slaughter" denounces a member of a NGO. The introduction of the amniocentesis and ultrasounds has just developed the phenomenon.

If the law imposes to public hospital not to reveal the sex of the baby, private clinics do not hesitate at telling it. Besides most of them propose a package deal "ultrasounds + abortion" from 5,000 to 10,000 rupees (100 to 200 €). In villages, portable ultrasound stations allow selecting male foetuses. Late abortions are also performed clandestinely in clinics that are not very scrupulous. Authorities intend to prevent these selective abortions but in this country where corruption is wildly used no physician was sentenced to jail. The elective abortion replaced another female elimination mode: the infanticide after the birth remaining into force for poor families.

To fight this genocide, several Indian states offer financial incentives to the parents who accept to raise girls but this aid has just a minor effect.

Violence and trafficking
Thus India has more and more men and in several regions, by sexual frustration, the violence against women increases. A lot of men are now looking for women. Some of them even buy their wife and polyandry cases are emerging.

A phenomenon which may intensify another drama: that of human being trafficking, a global problem which affects each year 1.2 million minors under 18. The figure for young girls bought and sold for marriage purposes or for prostitution and slavery increases yet to 4 millions. "The problem of arranged marriages– more than 80 millions in the world – forced on young girls under 18, was denounced by numerous humanitarian organisations, also for the lethal risk incurred by young mothers" stressed the agency Fides, news agency, the organ of Vatican Congregation.

Infanticide and genocide in India

Shirish S.Sheth, from Breach Candy Hospital of Bombay, indicates commenting the study of Lancet: "female infanticide of the past has now been refined and became a tried and tested technique under these new circumstances". He reminds that in 1986, Indian obstetric and gynaecologic societies had declared the female “foeticide" as a "crime against humanity”.

When today, in India, there is a “lack” of at least 36 million women, Dr B. S. Dahiya, who fights for more than twenty years against the elimination of girls declared in Marie-Claire that it is a real "genocide"³. For Donna Fernandes, member of the feminist association Vimochana, it is about "the more fundamental violation of human rights that exists. There is no human right if the right to be born is refused".

Elective abortion and right of women

The Lancet study specifies that as the level of education of women increases the female sex-ratio decreases. The deficit can be twice higher in “educated” woman, in her country or abroad, than in illiterate woman. The only factor of this selection would not be the poverty. To the weight of customs has to be added the one of total freedom feeling of “educated” woman faced with her choice of child.

Yet with the massive elimination of young girls, this "fundamental right" claimed by women to be able to say and have "a child when I want, as I want" seems to backfire on them.

Will the absolute feminism that transforms the freedom to abort into the emblem of all the fights against the sexist society become the first enemy of woman?

1 - The Lancet, 21/01/2006, Missing female births in India, Sheth SS, Vol. 367, Issue 9506, Pages 185-186
2 - Le Monde, 15/11/2005, "Il pourrait manquer 200 millions de femmes sur Terre en 2025".
3 - Marie-Claire, 09/2005, "Génocide en Inde. 36 millions de femmes manquent à l’appel".