Huge crowds protested in Paris at the weekend against a bill that deliberately removes a father from the life of a child. The bill is aimed at reforming the law around IVF which is currently legally accessible only by infertile opposite-sex couples. The law would extend IVF to single women and female same-sex couples. Many French bishops have spoken against the bill.

Organizers of the protests said the move would weaken the family and thus society, and that it is unjust “to authorise the manufacture of children voluntarily deprived of a father.”

Archbishop Michel Aupetit of Paris has said that the bill “touches on the most essential foundations on which our human societies are built: filiation, the non-commercialisation of the human body, respect of all life from its conception until its natural death, the best interest of the child, a philanthropic and non-commercial medicine, a human ecology where the body is not an instrument but the place of the edification of the personality.”