PMA: René Frydman criticises the absolutism of the desire for a child

Without calling into question artificial procreation, which he classifies as a "positive therapeutic solution", and happy to have contributed to the success of the first uterus transplant in France, he denounces the injunction to motherhood, which, in his view, leads people to "try everything". 

At a time when fertility is controlled, delayed if necessary or brandished as a right when the desire for a child arises, René Frydman's thoughts on the new tyranny of reproduction are relevant, but also questionable. Can we use techniques that make totally artificial procreation possible without falling into the abuses he fears, such as surrogate motherhood, the dream of an artificial womb or womb transplants for transgender men? What's more, while he warns against a diversion of medicine by distinguishing therapeutic cloning from reproductive cloning, which would even dispense with fertilisation, it is hard to understand where the line is drawn in practice. 

Artificial procreation, cryopreservation of gametes or embryos for future implantation, and the possibility of conceiving a child by means of a uterus transplant - don't these technologies contribute to exacerbate the desire for children? Where is the limit to their use before it becomes wrong? This question could perhaps have been answered by looking at the status that is given to embryos. But while René Frydman criticises the instrumentalization of the unborn child in the hypothesis of reproductive cloning, he does not go so far as to criticise the principle of artificial procreation, which inevitably manipulates and destroys certain embryos.   

Frydman distinguishes between the use of embryos to satisfy a selfish desire in the case of surrogacy or reproductive cloning on one hand, and their use in the case of research on the other hand. Can the scientific purpose of research and the therapeutic hopes that motivate scientific research justify the destruction of embryos and therefore their instrumentalization? Without answering these questions, René Frydman concludes the book by outlining the ethical risks that are inevitable when society relies on the 'all-scientific' approach, leading not only to disappointment as in the case of artificial procreation, but also to the dream of manufacturing made-to-measure children, another face of the tyranny he denounces.