"Why the arguments of the opponents of the '' PMA for all '' are not convincing"

Anne-Marie Leroyer is professor of private law and criminal sciences at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. She specializes in family law.

While the National Assembly adopted, at second reading, the bill on bioethics devoting, in the name of equality and non-discrimination, the opening of medically assisted procreation to all women, opponents mobilize in the debates two series of known and recurring arguments. The first consists in asserting that the law, by organizing the conception of a child without a father, would violate not only his rights or his best interests, but would also condemn him to the worst neuroses. The second, also known, consists in claiming that after assisted reproduction for all, we will have surrogacy, since the equality argument is useful for women, it should be useful for men.

Our purpose in these few lines is not to attempt controversy or to convince, but rather to shed light on what these arguments, which die hard, still pertain to our society.

Let us clarify things a little: the anti-PMA discourse for all is part of a mainly theoretical approach mobilizing various anthropological, psychoanalytic or political philosophy knowledge largely instrumentalized for the benefit of the desired result: the maintenance of an implicit heterosexual norm.

Let us take the anthropological argument: the law would sanction a major anthropological upheaval or rupture, hammer the opposition parliamentarians, an assertion which could also be shared by the National Consultative Ethics Committee or by the National Academy of Medicine. (Report on the draft law on bioethics, session of September 18, 2019, p. 2). The idea is that the essential anthropological structures of our kinship system would be based on paternal and maternal bilinearity. In this line, a questionable and debated appeal is made to a so-called structuralist thought, which sometimes mobilizes Lévi-Strauss, sometimes Lacan, and insists on the importance of the symbolic order, understood as the necessary difference between the sexes and generations, in the construction of kinship. Here is therefore anthropology summoned in a more than reductive way to explain how the change would be dangerous and, even if a small poaching on lands unknown to anthropologists is enough to see that there are societies without father or husband. .

The paradox is all the more striking given that anthropology is indeed a discipline which has been able to free itself from this normative constraint in order to think about kinship and including, moreover, in Lévi-Strauss. But after all it doesn't matter, let's admit that there is a rupture and that the law of bioethics constructs a completely different kinship system. Besides that this is not new, since French law has admitted this system since 2013 with the adoption, we are still looking for the danger that the system may present. Except to consider, but then it is arbitrary, that kinship can only be built on a heterosexual model which must be the norm, under penalty of collapsing. Finally, we should realize that there is nothing scientific about the affirmation and that the speeches summoning anthropology only use knowledge by misleading it.

Let us now take the psychoanalytic argument. Certain psychoanalysts and psychiatrists affirm the impossible psychic development of a child deprived of a father, his unconscious not being able to represent the symbolic scene originating in the generation. The fear is also developed that the absence of a father will not allow the child to perceive, in addition to the role of the mother, sexual difference and male-female otherness. Reference is also made to the symbolic representation of the father and to his role in the child's unconscious as a “separating third party”, that is to say in shortened form of the prohibition of incest.

We may well know that psychoanalysis has presented many and complex developments on the way of thinking about the Oedipus complex in the light of different sexual orientations, we always come back to these trivial and dangerous questions: how to think about sexual otherness and the prohibition of incest for a child whose parents are of the same sex? As if the homoparentate was going to carry in its wake sexual otherness and the taboo of incest. This appeal to the child's unconscious and to the symbolic representation of the father also forces us to renew the questioning of the relationship between law and psychoanalysis. We can see how some will instrumentalize psychoanalysis for prescriptive ends, which is curious again for a discipline of which this is hardly the object.

Finally, let us take the political philosophy argument. It is that of the limits of the creation of law that no one would like to rest on the nature of things. Since carnal procreation supposes the union of a man and a woman, filiation could only be constructed from this image, which would be both its framework and its limits. If the legal construction is different, and admits two mothers, then it is claimed that the law, devoid of a model, would be devoid of limits and the figure of a kinship with four or six parents is then brandished like a scarecrow. This way of thinking about filiation is not new and is part of an old historical perspective that belongs to the Middle Ages. It should be remembered that the commentators of the Digest , trying to find limits to political power, were based on a passage from Aristotle's Physics , according to which law, like art, had to imitate nature. Adoption law was then built on the idea that adoption is only a fiction which imitates nature and which, as such, necessarily follows its limits, under penalty of creating legal monsters.

Such an analysis, however, deviates naturalist philosophy, under the aegis of which it is sheltered. To claim that there would be no other limits to the power to create than the nature of things is a large misunderstanding of the concept of natural law. It is only necessary to recall the philosophical current of the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries and that of the Revolutionaries which irrigated the conception of human rights. The limits that we set ourselves do not relate so much to the nature of things, as to the taking into account of certain values. Thus, it is in the name of equality that lesbians have access to assisted reproduction. And the discussion around the consecration of surrogacy is organized around the confrontation of different values ​​since the imperative of equality is opposed to the dignity of the human person, in particular in the unethical contexts where these practices take place. . Summoning nature is therefore only the fruit of a dangerous arbitrariness simply intended to maintain a heteronormative model.

But that's not all. Let us take a closer look at a more empirical approach to the question: that of sociological surveys concerning the development of children raised in homoparental families. For a long time in France, this research was almost non-existent, while such studies were largely undertaken in the United States, the United Kingdom, but also in Belgium and the Netherlands. The rejection of this practical approach is, moreover, revealing of the importance of the theoretical argumentation around structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis, which is a specifically French polemic which can no doubt be explained by the fact that certain experts have took a special place in political debates. The point is that these studies could not be ignored for very long. The parliamentary proceedings thus report on the research carried out by Susan Golombok, director of the Center for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, who has been studying non-traditional families for more than forty years. In her conclusions, presented in 2017 at the 15th Congress of the Swiss Psychological Society, she declares: “The quality of interpersonal relationships within a family is more important for a child's development than the structure in which he grows up. " .

There are of course studies carried out in France by well-known teams, such as the DEVHOM survey conducted by a multidisciplinary team led by the professor of psychopathology Alain Ducousso-Lacaze, also highlighting that the educational role of parents of the same sex is the same as parents of different sexes. The analyzes thus question the stereotypical idea of ​​the non-interchangeable nature of paternal and maternal functions. The fact remains that opponents always try to find ways of rejecting such studies, arguing here of the narrowness of the corpus studied, or there of their necessarily militant character.

Read also: "Held by an existential debt, children born by PMA do not dare to claim their rights"

This is obviously a good way to reject in principle the conclusions of these studies which do not please. Because, conversely, the difference between the place and the role between the father and the mother with the child is struck, with the idea that motherhood is natural and fatherhood above all social. This essentialist vision of motherhood contributes to perpetuating a patriarchal family model, in which it is no longer a question of the complementarity of the roles of parents, but of their specificity. It is undoubtedly today the most significant argument in the debates on the kinship of the same sex. It is about questioning the place and the role of the father and the mother in the education of a child. However, we are still anchored in a system where we are told that the masculine and the feminine have natural specificities that it is not possible to see evolve.

However, it is essential that this change, not only for lesbians, but also for men who are fathers and who would like their place and role to be fully recognized with children. But for that, you have to change your model. Finally, the arguments of the opponents force us to reconsider the gender stereotypes linked to the places of each parent. This is also a more egalitarian society.