René Frydman is well-known in France for his role as a pioneer in the assisted reproductive technology (ART) field. He was behind the birth of the first French baby born via in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1986, and also created the country’s first “savior sibling” — a highly controversial practice — in 2011. Frydman is, without a doubt, an ardent support of ART and IVF… but even he has become dismayed at how far the fertility industry has fallen.
Frydman recently spoke with Le Figaro about his new book, “La Tyrannie de la Reproduction,” or a “tyranny of reproduction.” In it, he warns that the ART landscape has gone too far, with people willing to do anything and pay anything in order to obtain a child.
“All this builds the belief that ‘everything is possible’ thanks to science, and imposes a weight, that of reproduction at all costs. It’s this ‘everything is possible’ that I try to counterbalance in my book,” he said. “Because I have seen many couples exhaust themselves in this hellish quest for a child. People who have no chance persist, resorting to heavy and exhausting techniques whose merits can be contested. I wanted to provide some food for thought to say that there is not just one possible route. How many times have I heard a sigh of relief from patients to whom I announced that there was no more hope?”
He further argued that in the fertility industry, little concern is paid to the rights of the children created in the process, with doctors treated as salespeople obliged to give buying customers the product they want. “The doctor is not a button press who must obey wishes. It’s not automatic,” he said, but acknowledged, “There is also hubris on the part of the medical profession. The doctor who says ‘I’m going to give you a child,’ who feels invested with omnipotence, like the American doctor who implanted eight embryos in the body of a woman who gave birth to octuplets, the famous ‘Octomom.'”
Frydman also said it has become commonplace for women to undergo abortions in their 20s and 30s, only to desperately try to get pregnant 10 years later. “We are dealing with patients who want to avoid having children and others who want them at all costs,” he said. “Pregnancies are occurring later and later, this is an evolution in society. Medicine is being asked to respond to this societal evolution.”
Additionally, Frydman slammed the denial of the reality of surrogacy, both on the surrogate mother and the baby:
Many people do not want to see that this is an exploitation of women’s bodies, which is paradoxical at a time when we claim to protect them from any aggression. But it is undoubtedly one.
I have carried out more than 3000 deliveries, I know what I am talking about. A bond is created during pregnancy and childbirth which makes the separation between the child and the person who carried it cruel.
We have also done everything to avoid it: we now put the child immediately near his mother, we practice skin to skin, we advise breastfeeding. And with GPA, we organize this separation. We talk a lot today about the difficulties of pregnancy and childbirth (various ailments, episiotomy, postpartum blues, etc.), but strangely all this disappears when we talk about surrogate mothers. When you interview those who have benefited from it, whether they are homosexual or heterosexual, and who had a very strong desire to have children, which we can completely understand, everything goes very well.
But resorting to a third person to satisfy one’s desire, and the risk of causing imbalances in this person, is not fair.
Surrogacy has come under increasing criticism, with more and more people rightly pointing out that it is exploitative. Pope Francis made international headlines when he recently called for a worldwide ban on the “deplorable” practice of surrogacy.
Frydman also spoke about abortion; though Frydman admitted to committing abortions, he said his expectation was that the rise in contraception would cause abortions to decrease, and that has not happened in France. “[We] said to ourselves that contraception would develop and that there would be prevention rather than an act which is never simple, for the person who experiences it as well as for the person who realizes it. I can’t explain why this didn’t happen.”
Studies have found that contraception can, in fact, raise abortion rates; the Guttmacher Institute, for example, has found that about half of women seeking abortions were using contraception the month they became pregnant. What Frydman does not seem to see is that abortion and ART are two sides of the same coin: instead of honoring the inherent humanity of preborn children as human beings with intrinsic rights, they are treated as products — valuable when wanted, and disposable when not.
