• Parliament must definitively adopt the bioethics bill on Tuesday.

  • The flagship measure of this law is the opening of assisted reproduction to all women, single people and homosexual couples.

  • France thus becomes the eleventh country in the European Union to authorize assisted reproduction for all women.

    But what is French law worth compared to those of our European neighbors?

After two years of debates, demonstrations and controversies of all kinds, the bioethics law must definitely be adopted this Tuesday in the National Assembly.

While its flagship measure is to make assisted reproduction accessible to all women, this law provides a broader framework for medically assisted procreation.

Measures eagerly awaited by some French women who chose to do their assisted procreation course abroad rather than on national territory because of the difficulties encountered.

If France has taken a big step forward with this law, it is far from having aligned itself in all points with other European countries known for their access to assisted reproduction.

20 Minutes

takes stock of the situation in France compared to the rest of the EU.

What is the most significant advance of this bioethics law?

Clearly, making assisted reproduction accessible to all French women is a colossal step forward.

France thus becomes the eleventh country among the 27 of the European Union to authorize assisted reproduction for both single women and female couples.

It thus joins the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Malta.

Outside the EU, the UK and Iceland offer these same rights.

In contrast, assisted reproduction is permitted for single women and prohibited for female couples in Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Hungary and Latvia.

Austria distinguishes itself by allowing lesbian couples to use assisted reproduction, but not single women.

Finally, Germany and Italy are now the only two large EU countries not to allow female couples or single women to use assisted reproduction.

Does this law mean that access to assisted reproduction will be facilitated, compared to other EU countries?

Nothing is less certain for Virginie Rio, president of the Collectif Bamp association, which brings together patients and ex-patients of the AMP (medically assisted procreation), infertile and sterile people having recourse to assisted reproduction techniques. . Contrary to what the association recommended, the deputies did not authorize private centers for medically assisted procreation to donate gametes or oocytes or self-preservation, that is to say freezing oocytes. “This will concentrate all the requests - those of single women, lesbian women and heterosexual couples - in public centers which are limited in number in the territory and are not present in all regions. "

Indeed, France has 29 CECOs (Centers for the Study and Conservation of Human Eggs and Sperm), in which waiting times are already extremely long.

“You have to wait around two years for a gamete donation and two to five years, or even seven for oocytes”, explains Laetitia Poisson Deléglise, president of the Maïa association, which helps and supports people having difficulty becoming parents. .

“In addition to that, we can sometimes wait up to 6 months to have an appointment in a center,” she continues.

In comparison, in Spain, where there are many centers for assisted reproduction, mainly private, between making an appointment and transferring the embryo, the clinics report a waiting period of between 3 to 9 months.

What happened to the measure concerning the sorting of embryos, present in other European countries?

Very controversial aspect of the bioethics law, the expansion of preimplantation diagnosis to search for chromosomal abnormalities (DPI-A) was ultimately not retained by the deputies.

While preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which consists of analyzing embryos obtained by in vitro fertilization in order to prevent the transmission of a genetic disease from the parents, is legal, PGD-A which aims to identify abnormalities in the number of chromosomes of the embryo, is not.

"It is a tool used abroad to improve the success rates of in vitro fertilization and prevent miscarriages," says Virginie Rio.

Today in France, regardless of age, 60% of embryos that are transferred are not viable.

It goes up to 80% for women over 35, but we transfer them anyway.

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In which European camp is France on the anonymity of donations?

It is a choice of the government and yet it is not unanimous in Europe.

Thus, Spain, Italy, Poland, Lithuania and the Czech Republic have retained the anonymity of donation of oocytes and gametes, unlike France now, but also Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, or the United Kingdom.

"Some French women did not hesitate to go to Denmark to have a non-anonymous donation and information on the progenitor," says Laetitia Poisson Deléglise, satisfied with the measure.

The president of the Maïa association admits that this lifting of anonymity on donations risks reducing the number of donors.

“This is what we observed in certain countries such as England or Belgium when they applied this measure.

However, we also noticed that it only lasted for a while and that it then returned to normal ”.

By refusing post-mortem assisted reproduction, does France stand out from the rest of Europe?

Yes a little, when we know that the transfer of embryos after the death of the spouse is authorized (sometimes under conditions) in about twenty European countries such as Belgium, Cyprus, Spain, Estonia, Hungary, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic and United Kingdom. *

For Virginie Rio, this is an aberration of the bioethics law.

“This means that if the spouse dies before the embryo transfer, the law says you can donate these embryos to science, to another couple, or destroy them, but you cannot use them for yourself.

However, you can request a sperm donation.

It really is an inconsistency.

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