We Keep LGBTQ+ Women & Girls Up-To-Date
French bioethics law was up for revision, with a crucial amendment that would allow insemination for all women, regardless of their sexual orientation or relationship status. The country's senators were tasked with considering this pivotal amendment.
Currently, only straight married women have the right to inseminate to conceive a child, and those even if equal marriage and adoption are legal in France since 2013.
LGBTQ women are therefore going abroad to benefit from this procreation technique. They often choose Belgium or Spain, which have less discriminatory laws, but this represents a significant financial cost.
During the last presidential campaign, candidate Emmanuel Macron had promised to present a bill to open insemination to all women during the revision of the bioethics law. The government has thus introduced an amendment to the Assembly in October 2019.
After lawmakers approved the amendment on first reading, and even though the Senate has a Republican majority, senators voted to open up insemination to all women on first reading.
Unfortunately, it was not the same story for the second vote.
In the second vote, there was a clear hardening of views on insemination with the rejection of the amendment opening up insemination to single women.
Then, all of a sudden, in the middle of the session, the approval of the amendment opening up post-mortem insemination, that is to say after the death of the spouse, made the debate so heated that the session was closed with the rejection of the first article, the one that allows couples of women to benefit from insemination.
However, it was agreed at that time that a second session of debate and vote would be organized as indicated president of the bioethics committee, Alain Milon, a republican in favor of opening insemination to all women.
Two days later, the dream of thousands of LGBTQ women was shattered.
The committee gave up on the second deliberation.
What a disappointment!
Véronique Cerasoli
“It’s absolutely awful,” Véronique Cerasoli, the spokeswoman of SOS Homophobie, told Agence France-Presse. “Behind this, there are women who have been tossed around for years from debate to debate, punctuated by demonstrations by opponents. They despised lesbian women, it’s an insult to them who have been waiting for PMA [the name given to insemination in France] for so long.”
Nicolas Faget
“The Assembly will restore the text, so we’re not too worried,” said Nicolas Faget, a spokesperson for the Association of Gay and Lesbian Parents and Future Parents (APGL). “But that the Senate instrumentalizes the families for a political quarrel, it is ignoble. It is disgusting to play with the hopes of families,” he added.
I have indeed read that legislators will reinstate the text, but how and especially when?
Strangely, the Senate has voted for the reform of the filiation that draws consequence from the opening of insemination. The second mom could adopt the child thus conceived. This will allow them to be attached officially and to be regarded as a family.
Note that senators also approved the rewriting of the recognition of children born by GPA abroad, since it is illegal in France, to “prohibit any full transcription” of the birth certificate.
Photo of Faget from France24
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