From acclaimed novelist Mona Simpson, in today’s NYT:
Novels used to end with the marriage: now we have divorce, blended families, test-tube babies, surrogate moms. Fiction is where we get to how these new arrangements work in life.
The French National Assembly Report on the Family and the Rights of Children (2006):
[The commission] considered the consequences for the child’s development and the construction of his or her identity of creating a fictitious filiation by law of two fathers, or two mothers which is biologically neither real nor plausible. …A majority of the Mission does not wish to question the fundamental principles of the law of filiation, which are based on the tripartite unit of a father, a mother, a child , citing the principle of caution. For that reason, that majority also, logically, chose to deny access to marriage to same-sex couples. (p. 7)
Categories: Children of Divorce, Marriage, Reproductive Technologies
Thank you for the link, Elizabeth.
In addition to affirming the natural family and its logical place in the concept of marriage, it seems the French have some of the same ethical concerns with Donor Conception as the contributors to this blog. Such as:
“The desire for a child seems to have become a right to a child, which society to allow to be exercised by any means necessary. Given that claim, trying to systematically adapt the law to the demands made by adults may give rise to ethical questions and lead to questioning of the
fundamental principles of the law of filiation”
The Commission’s statement goes on to conclude that ART was meant to address a medical condition and should not be used as a matter of convenience. When a technology that was seen as a medical procedure evolves into a business that is out to makes money and maximize consumer demand, things like this can happen:
“ In California, for instance, the birth of a child might involve as many as five people: a sperm donor, an egg donor, a gestator and the couple who are the legal parents.”
This bit of information shocked me. It resembles an assembly line in a factory.
Also, the Commission touched on a subject that the lovely Alana has posted on previously:
“ Compensation, even in the form of merely covering costs, would be an incentive for economically disadvantaged women to give up their ova to earn money, as is the case in some other countries, and in particular the United States.”
How is it that other countries have this information and have moved to regulate DC while the US appears to be clueless?
Dear Anna,
It’s an excellent question you pose. I wonder the exact same thing. And I also wonder why more folks who think of themselves as progressive/left aren’t all over this… the commodification of people – children and the grown people they become (the “products”), women (the egg and womb factories), men (rated on websites, sperm bought and sold). The deliberate separation of children from biological parents repeating a story told too many times in human history, whether it’s the disappeared or the stolen generations or the horrors of slavery or the abuses that have been seen at times in the history of adoption.
I think it will change, but I wish it would change faster.
PS — and yes, the French really nailed it in that report that I cite and that you read… (apparently there is a longer version too, if you’re interested! 453 pages, in French)
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/12/pdf/rap-info/i2832.pdf