Beginning of life

Medically assisted procreation (MAP) covers a range of techniques, devised by the medical profession and then organised by the legislator, to respond to infertility which reveals dysfunctions in the body. Societal demand for access to MAP is based on the possibility of using these techniques for purposes other than treating infertility linked to a pathology. We are witnessing an increase in the number of requests for recourse to PGM, which were previously either non-existent or very marginal, driven by changes in society, French law and the laws of certain foreign countries, as well as changes in technology.

It was against this backdrop that the CCNE decided to take another look at societal demand for MAP as a whole. The ethical reflection focuses on three of these requests: (1) oocyte self-preservation in young women; (2) requests for recourse to MAP by female couples and individual women; (3) requests for surrogate motherhood, from heterosexual couples, but also from male couples and single men.

The CCNE has developed a method for analysing these different requests for recourse to AMP, with the intention of proposing benchmarks and general criteria to inform ethical reflection. These include technical and biological factors, as well as changes in the organisation of the human relationships involved in the process. This method - set out in this chapter and then applied to each case and each technique - makes it possible to identify and explain the main questions at the root of the points of view on the new demands for access to procreation techniques (...)