France: anti-PMAs back in the streets against the bioethics bill
Audio 01:18
Protesters against the bioethics law in front of the Ministry of Justice in Paris on October 10, 2020. AP Photo / Thibault Camus
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4 min
In France, the group of associations Marchons enfants has organized demonstrations all over the country to denounce the bioethics bill which must soon be examined by the Senate.
Among the most contested measures: access to assisted reproduction, medically assisted procreation, for single women and female couples.
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To respect the imposed limits, in this period of epidemic, several gatherings took place in Paris and its suburbs.
Place Vendôme, in front of the Ministry of Justice, more than a thousand people gathered in the afternoon.
A forest of red and green flags flutter with a single slogan, "Liberty, equality, fatherhood".
Many demonstrators came with families, many even.
It is a white, bourgeois and Catholic France which mobilized this Saturday in Paris to defend traditional values.
"
We forget that we are part of an entire society in which there are several ideas and in particular Judeo-Christian origins which are symbolized by the family which seems increasingly undermined
", confides a protester.
“
Everyone seems to want to take a step forward for nature, but alongside that we are passing laws that go totally against human nature,
” adds another.
Protesters want to change the text
The bioethics bill may well have been passed
at second reading by the National Assembly on August 1.
The demonstrators do not despair of changing the text.
"
People must at least realize that it is not because we want something that it is due, we cannot say
" because I want something, Everything is allowed" ".
This grandmother, like other demonstrators, denounces a dangerous drift, also evoking the extension of the deadline for a voluntary intervention of pregnancy, another text under consideration.
But also the threat of authorization of surrogacy, or the use of a surrogate mother.
Measure, on the other hand, absent from any legislative project.
Counter-demonstrations in several cities
Responding to the call of the collective of associations Marchons Enfants, including the Manif pour tous, the demonstrators were 1,700 according to the organizers in Versailles, several hundred in Paris, Toulouse, Lille, Rennes, Bordeaux, Lyon, Clermont-Ferrand.
Counter-demonstrations were held in several cities: in Rennes, Clermont-Ferrand, in Toulouse, where police officers charged with tear gas and batons a group of about twenty LGBT activists positioned on the route of the Manif pour tous, or in Lyon, where a hundred LGBT activists and "antifas" briefly tried to disturb the speeches.
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