"Changing the way we see them", is the combat of Emmanuel Laloux, president of the collective Les amis d’Eléonore (Eléonore”s Friends), which he founded, and father of Eléonore, a young woman with Down syndrome now aged 27, who has a permanent part-time job and her own apartment. The journalist explains that "this combat is far from being won. Soon, with a simple blood sample taken during the first weeks of pregnancy, a woman will be able to know if the foetus she is carrying has chromosome disorders, genetic diseases or predispositions to certain cancers. And be able to terminate her pregnancy well before the legal time of thirteen weeks." Still, Emmanuel Laloux says that he is relieved that he did not know that his "baby was to have Down syndrome." "Fortunately, we did not know. All we knew about Down syndrome was just the clichés that society uses, so we might have been led to adopt the eugenic solution."
In France, the bioethics laws of 2004 prohibit "the implementation of any eugenic practice leading to the organisation of the selection of persons," and "the Penal Code punishes this crime with thirty years of imprisonment and a fine of €7,500,000." Nevertheless, the arrival of these "new techniques of early scanning, without danger for the future mother and her foetus," amounts to a veritable "selection of the children" to be born. Regarding these new tests, Pierre Le Coz, philosopher and former member of the National Consultative Committee on Ethics (CCNE) says that "we still find it hard to grasp their full significance, but they form a revolution, an earthquake." He adds that he can see the emergence of a "society that tracks down and targets those to be eliminated."
Alexandra Benachi, head of the gynaecology-obstetrics department of Antoine-Béclère hospital (Clamart), says that she has "already tested the Prenatest with future mothers, for the Cerba laboratory." She adds that the test ought to be reserved for "screening women with a high risk of Down syndrome." However, she is convinced that "in the name of equal access, within less than five years all Frenchwomen will be offered this test instead of the blood screening in the first three months."
Jean-Marie Le Méné, President of the Fondation Jérôme Lejeune which finances therapeutic research on Down syndrome, protests: "What is the aim of these new tests? To reach zero Down syndrome?" He adds that this new test "is a false form of progress. The outcome of screening is elimination. It is the determination to ensure that these children are not born. This is not to the glory of a society that boasts about respecting differences and helping the weakest." In the same vein, Jacques Testart, the biologist whose work led to the birth of the first test-tube baby in 1982, says that he deplores "the implacable march towards eugenics" and points out that "we are moving towards a customised humanity that is competitive, productive and not humanistic."
The journalist concludes: "these questions show that a national debate on these tests is indispensable, as well as a very strict regulation of their use to prevent abuses."
