Huge crowds protested in Paris at the weekend against a bill that deliberately removes a father from the life of a child [1]. 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 [2].
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.”