Paris (AFP)
The Senate voted Wednesday against the "double donation" of gametes, a measure defended by the government in the bioethics bill and which would authorize the use of both an oocyte donation and a sperm donation as part of 'an LDC.
It was the LR senators - majority in the Senate - who brought the amendments voted against the double donation. Dominique de Legge sees in it "a break in the biological bond", whereas "until now, the law prohibited double donation to ensure that the child was always biologically born from one of the two members of the couple".
According to the boss of the senators LR Bruno Retailleau, if this "carnal" link is broken, that "can ask serious questions" as regards filiation and open "a lot of possibilities", whereas the current law wants "to preserve a line for the 'child".
On the other side of the hemicycle, the socialist Jacques Bigot castigated the "conception of the family largely exceeded" defended by the LR.
On the government bench, the Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn explained wanting with the double donation to respond to situations of "double infertility" in couples.
Current law prohibits double donation and requires that the gametes come from at least one member of the couple in order to conceive an embryo. Supernumerary frozen embryos which are no longer the subject of a parental plan can however be taken in by other couples.
But "it is clear that" in the event of double infertility, couples are "not in favor of receiving an embryo from another project". Only "twenty children are born each year, against 10,000 frozen embryos," argued Agnès Buzyn, without convincing the senators.
The Assembly had voted without difficulty in favor of the double donation at the first reading of this bioethics bill and should logically reconsider the Senate vote on this point.
© 2020 AFP