Plans by President Emmanuel Macron to permit single women and lesbian couples to use donor sperm have been attacked by the National Academy of Medicine in France because it will lead to the deliberate creation of children who will be raised without fathers.

In a report at the weekend, the Academy said the deliberate conception of a child deprived of a father constitutes a major anthropological break, which risks the psychological development of the child.

“The father figure,” it said, “remains a founding stone of the child’s personality”.

Proponents of the bill say it is unfair that some women must, at great cost, travel to Belgium or Spain to access such fertility treatment. However, Valérie Boyer, an MP for the Republican Party, said that depriving children of fathers creates inequalities. She added that the proposed new law does not take the interests of children into account.

“Until now France considered IVF not as a right but as a medical procedure to treat infertility,” Daniel Borrillo, a law professor at Paris Nanterre University, told the Financial Times on Monday. “In this new law, what counts is no longer the pathology but the desire to become a parent, be it as a heterosexual or a homosexual couple, or a single woman.”

Some of the most controversial elements have already been removed from the bill, including preimplantation diagnosis which screens embryos for serious genetic abnormalities.

Health Minister Agnes Buzyn, who supports the bill, has previously said she is opposed to widening access to preimplantation diagnosis because it marks a “clear eugenic drift” that would lead to “a society that will sort embryos”.