“Hey dad, how much did I cost? This question is still imaginary, but not for long. Nothing will soon prevent a child from discovering that, on the assisted reproduction market, he was worth between 100,000 and 150,000 euros. This is the price paid by the French animator Christophe Beaugrand and her husband to acquire Valentin from a surrogate mother in Nevada. And since in this world everything has a price, perhaps Valentin will soon be able to compare his purchase price with that of his classmates on his mobile phone. Who says better ?
In these matters, reality has long since caught up with fiction. Quebec was until very recently one of the nations which, like France and Morocco, prided themselves on prohibiting surrogacy (GPA) by affirming that any contract concluded on a living being was “absolutely null”. . Bill 12 will put an end to this exception, subjecting Quebec once again to Canadian commercialism which, in ten years, has made this country one of the main destinations for a lucrative procreative market.
Admittedly, the bill claims to “regulate” surrogacy by allowing the “surrogate mother” to terminate the contract, by imposing “prior information sessions” and by prohibiting remuneration (but not the reimbursement of expenses) . However, it is not because the Black Code, proclaimed from sad memory in 1685, regulated the practice of slavery and limited its excesses that it made it a less barbaric practice. The comparison may seem exaggerated, but both cases involve the commodification of bodies.
This is what a hundred lawyers, doctors and psychologists from all over the world said, meeting on March 3 in Casablanca. Under the aegis of the former president of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Luis Ernesto Pedernera Reyna, they demanded the universal abolition of this practice “contrary to human dignity”.
The “ethical GPA” that Bill 12 claims to establish is a decoy, say these experts. First, because with the exception of extremely rare (or psychiatric) cases, no woman dreams of becoming pregnant in order to give her child to strangers. This “free” is therefore most often a wishful thinking. Then, because, paid or not, surrogacy consists of making a woman’s body available to others despite all the dangers inherent in pregnancy: 20% miscarriages, 15% episiotomies, 20% cesareans, 15% forceps, etc. All this in order, at the end of nine months, to snatch her child from her and put him by contract at the disposal of sponsors as one would do with any merchandise.
For many years, science has continued to demonstrate the importance and richness of intrauterine life. All doctors know the deleterious effects, both for the mother and for the child, of a sudden and definitive separation after nine months of living together. A specialist in newborns, Marie-Claire Busnel even speaks of a “primordial wound”. Those who have been faced with the adoption of a child know that it never closes completely.
And now, in the name of a supposed “right to a child”, some claim the privilege of knowingly creating orphans to satisfy their “desire for a child”. From time immemorial, adoption has been used to make up for the accidents of life as best they can. By what right would we now allow ourselves to voluntarily plan the abandonment of an infant by its mother to put it in the arms of a stranger, even the donor of gametes?
In France and Quebec, personalities have spread their personal story of adoption, often perfumed with rose water, in the media. It is obviously not their “love” that is in question here. Except that no love justifies instrumentalizing the body of a woman and imposing on the child stigmata that he will carry all his life. All at taxpayers’ expense.
Here, the cult of individual rights leads us astray. If our societies have duties and responsibilities, it is not with regard to these “intended parents”, but with regard to the most vulnerable: the mother and the child. “There is no right to the child except to transform it into merchandise”, wrote the biologist Jacques Testart. This pioneer of assisted procreation lamented that the methods he had helped to develop, “to resolve genuine misfortunes, are gradually being imposed to correct frustrations, even to offer an escape from the human condition”. If medicine is right to help couples suffering from infertility, the researcher reminds us, it is not there to push back the limits inherent in their biological condition.
We are here in the domain of hubris and excess. Because what do these individual-kings dream of, if not of the post-human “brave new world”, where sexual lack of differentiation would allow them to satisfy their “desire for a child” whenever they want and at any price? A bit like ordering a meal on Uber.
It is also surprising to note the deafening silence of certain feminists in the face of this commodification of women’s bodies. Should we see in this the mark of this “intersectional feminism” which some are advocating even in the National Assembly and which the American feminist Christina Hoff Sommers had rather described as “kidnapped feminism”? A feminism which, if we have understood correctly, relegates the vital interests of women and children far behind those of racial, ethnic or sexual minorities.