Poll finds majority opposes assisted procreation
Strong Catholic mobilisation has resulted in a largely negative public reaction in an official online survey about the legalisation of assisted procreation.
The response poses a challenge to President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to allow it to be included in a reform of France’s bioethics laws later this year.
The survey, part of a wide public debate over several months, had so many negative comments that pro-reform activists charged that critics encouraged by the Catholic Church had used computer programmes to flood the website with their views.
While opinion polls say about 60 per cent of the French support assisted procreation, about 77 per cent of respondents to the government-sponsored survey opposed it. Gay rights groups backing the reform apparently failed to mobilise their supporters.
Additionally, a survey for the medical journal, Le Quotidien du Médecin, revealed that doctors were sharply divided over the reform. It showed 45 per cent opposed assisted procreation for lesbian couples, against 44 per cent for it, and 48 per cent objected to it for single women against 41 per cent.
Some 65 per cent of doctors surveyed said the current legislation, which bans assisted procreation, is “balanced”, the survey showed, and only 27 per cent thought it was “too restrictive”. A long-planned church campaign against any liberalisation of the bioethics laws got an important boost last December when Pope Francis named Bishop Michel Aupetit, who was a physician for 11 years before entering the seminary, as the Archbishop of Paris.
An active participant in bioethics debates, Archbishop Aupetit (pictured) argued against a free-market medical policy where any procedure could be bought for a price. “I’m afraid we’re practising an Anglo-Saxon-style medicine based on contracts, rather than on relations of trust,” he told the journal.
The National Consultative Ethics Committee (CCNE) will present its post-debate recommendations to the government and parliament on Monday. A reform bill is expected in the autumn in parliament, where Mr Macron’s large majority should ensure its passage.
“I’m sure the CCNE will take into account the artificial and organised over-representation of those critical voices,” said a spokesman for SOS homophobie, a group that combats discrimination against LGBT people. CCNE has declined to comment.
Opponents of the reform, many of them veterans of the failed protests against the 2013 legalisation of same-sex marriage, say they are preparing their own report based on the majority of negative comments on the official website.
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