Julia is 30 years old and has lived for five years with Julie, who is 35. The two Parisians are married, work in publishing and have always wanted to have a child together. The date of September 29, 2021 changed their lives. “The day the Minister of Health announced on the radio that the government was signing the law. We cried, Julia remembers. It was really important for us. I called within a minute to make an appointment.” The implementing decree of the bioethics law provides, among other things, for this expansion of access to medically assisted procreation to single women and lesbian couples. This extension of the PMA to all women was also last year the main demand of the pride march, the 2022 edition of which takes place on Saturday June 25.
>> PMA for all: eight months after its launch, the system attracts many single women
For 9 months, the couple has been going through consultations and examinations. The first insemination could take place in September. “We put so much energy into it that we changed apartments to have an extra room, emphasizes, enthusiastic, Julia. The closer we get to the end, the longer it seems to us too, because we’ve been waiting for years.”
But Julia was lucky, because the difficulty for many women today is already to find a first date. There are huge disparities between the territories, from a few weeks in Île-de-France to more than a year in Lyon or Montpellier. PMA for all “is real progressassures Dr. Mikaël Agopiantz, coordinating doctor of the Nancy medical procreation center, but we could do better.”
Some centers have as many assisted reproduction requests since the extension as they had before over an entire year, hence the queues. A situation that specifically concerns lesbian couples. “The tension on the sperm donation activity has increased approximately fivefold, observes Doctor Mikaël Agopiantz. Sperm donation is currently restricted to less than 30 centers whereas there are 100 clinical-biological centers in France.”
He would like all the centers to be able to collect these donations. Today, there is no longer any question of discrimination as at the beginning when authorizations were signed only by couples of women. But the law errs in its lack of clarity. “It’s a big lack that we’ve been reporting for several months, alert Céline Sesterce, the president of the association Les enfants d’arc-en-ciel.
“We would like to see clearly on the legal issues which are linked in particular to filiation and which are really very complex. It is still today up to us to provide after-sales service for this law and this device.””
Celine Sesterceat franceinfo
Between very long delays and a lack of information, couples continue to turn to Belgium and Spain, where PMA is simpler but paying. In France, health professionals and associations report these difficulties to the bioethics law monitoring committee, which is working to correct the situation.