Just days after the launch of États Généraux (Estates General) on Bioethics, Marianne Durano, Philosophy Graduate and author of Mon corps ne vous appartient pas (My body doesn’t belong to you), published an article in Le Figaro in which she denounced the “mock debate (…) to supposedly generate consensus not only in terms of medically assisted procreation (MAP) but also surrogacy per se, in the short term”. She states that the issue was “a foregone conclusion”: “The specifically worded business plan was ready and waiting, together with the schedule, media spokesperson and sales reps”. She uses these terms because “regardless of what we think, MAP is a service rather than a treatment”: the different techniques used in medically assisted procreation “are not intended to treat diseased bodies but to technically replace procreation”.
“Public service” or “customer service”? In both cases, “the problem is not personal, but political”. A public service comes under national solidarity, which “isn’t supposed to provide technical services but to look after the most vulnerable”. Making MAP available to single women or homosexuals redefines the role of this national solidarity, “which, from now on, has to manage frustration as well as disease. (…) Financing MAP for women who are biologically fertile when one in three French people give up treatment due to a shortage of money and the number of maternity hospitals has been cut by one-third over the last forty years, is tantamount to using public money for private purposes,” observes the philosopher. Furthermore, “subsidising artificial procreation for healthy women” is tantamount to granting “potentially unconditional and unlimited rights to have a child”, thereby transforming that child into nothing more than an object. Thus, “if biology is no longer a criterion, on what grounds are we depriving a single woman in her sixties from the joys of motherhood?”
However, “there’s still time to refuse the creation of “made-to-order” children. Marianne Durano concludes that, “There’s still time to promote healing medicine versus dehumanising technique”.
Le Figaro, Marianne Durano (23/01/2018)