The French Parliament is debating the bill ” “on bioethics. A vote in favour of ” “experiments on embryos” “” “
The French National Assembly has approved research on surplus embryos, but has banned cloning for therapeutic purposes. This is the result of a wide-ranging revision of the bill on bioethics of 1994. As regards cloning, the deputies opposed therapeutic cloning because they fear it will lead the way, sooner or later, to reproductive cloning. We asked Father Patrick Verspieren , director of the department of biomedical ethics at the Jesuit Sèvres Centre in Paris and editor of the review “Etudes”, to analyze the results of the parliamentary debate. What’s your assessment of this first phase of the parliamentary debate on bioethics? “The deputies accepted that the embryo can be used and discarded, i.e. treated like an object. It is not considered as belonging to humanity! The decision represents a radical shift, a rupture of the continuity between embryo, child and adult. And reaching the point of lacking respect for the human being right from the moment of his conception cannot but have repercussions also on the end of his existence. The ‘reification’ of the human embryo, its reduction to an object, cannot but reduce the obligation to respect the human person!” Is there a risk of opening the way to cloning, first therapeutic and then reproductive? “At the end of 2000, the government had seriously taken into consideration the possibility of permitting the creation of embryos through cloning, by the technique of nuclear transfer: this means introducing the nucleus removed from a child or adult cell into the ovulus of a woman. The objective was ‘therapeutic’. Some scientists hoped to obtain cells that would have had the same genome as a sick person, to realize transplants that would not have caused rejection. After a negative opinion by the Council of State, however, the government decided, at least for the time being, not to propose the legalization of therapeutic cloning. And the deputies rejected an amendment that would have authorized it”. Why? “At the medical level, the value of therapeutic cloning was now being challenged by certain scientists. Moreover, another reason, of a juridical and ethical order, was also adduced: developing therapeutic cloning could facilitate reproductive cloning, which is disapproved by almost the whole of French society”.
