Two mothers = a father?

Nothing better illustrates the persistence of the dissymmetry of the sexes than the confrontation of each with the question of procreation. Like everyone else, homosexuals answer this question and, until now, they had no choice but to turn to someone of the other sex.

What has changed, to the point of highlighting the notion of homoparentality, is the possibility, at least apparent, to do without the other sex to “have” children, as we often hear on the radio: an actress also famous “had children with his girlfriend”. We would almost forget all that this wonderful performance owes to biomedical techniques and the anonymous sperm donor put to work in California or Belgium.

But sperm donation and artificial insemination have been practiced for a long time in the USA for “classical” couples in the context of medically assisted procreation , without anyone being enthusiastic or doubtfully about the transformation of life-giving individuals into mere anonymous biological materials, while children are made-to-order products and, in some countries, commodities. We now know the ravages often caused to children by the deliberate organization of the secrecy maintained around the person of their parents, even when a legal father exists and has played his full role.

Thus, the first reflection that imposes on our modern societies, before any legislative tinkering on the terms of filiation, concerns the distinction, fundamental in law, between people and things. The philosopher Hans Jonas considered the responsibility of human beings for their offspring as the archetype of responsibility. Sperm donors and egg donors are first and foremost human beings: they are said to give cells to a “couple” while helping to give life to a child, which this child will know one day and ask for accounts.

Not that he suffered in his childhood, but because, as a person, he will want to know who he is and what his human history is. This is why it is urgent to carry out a global reflection on the role of reproductive medicine and the conditions

ethics of its practices, regardless of the couples for whom they are intended. A family law certainly can not replace such a flat reform.

The problem is different for men — sexual dissymmetry is mandatory — because homoparental procreation requires oocyte donation and the use of surrogate mothers.

Again, this practice is not just about same-sex couples. But it is they who are the most active advocates for its legalization, for example by the voice of the group Homosexuality and socialism or that of LGBT associations (lesbian, gay, bi and trans). In this regard, the government’s positions seem clear. This excludes any legalization of the use of women as “surrogate mothers”, aware of the commodification of the body that it inevitably entails, with the exploitation of socially fragile women, as happens in other countries.

But it is disturbing and incoherent that Ministers and other representatives continue to announce that we will continue to examine this issue; or tor that we grant a certificate of nationality to children born to surrogates mothers abroad. You must know that children born in this way have a civil status issued by the country in which they were born. They are not without identity and can lead a normal family life. It would be impossible to understand that, by indirect means, we finally give the answer to those who deliberately circumvent the legislation in force.

But is it not up to future parents to question their approach and their project? And first of all to women, since they can already order sperm samples online. Rates “sperm banks” are available online, with photos and characteristics of donors.

Homosexual parenthood as a new model of parentage is another area for reflection.

The principle of marriage open to all couples brings many people together, whereas the principle of homoparentality divides them.

A conservative status quo would make little sense. Yes, it is possible to institute a same-sex marriage. This innovation is desirable because it will help ensure the full social recognition of homosexual couples who are waiting for it. But it transforms the meaning of the old marriage, its main effect being the presumption of paternity of the husband, which makes no sense for a same-sex couple.

This presumption of paternity has not disappeared from modern marriage, but it has changed profoundly. Thus, the rights of all children now rest on the establishment of their civil affiliation, that is, their attachment to parents who have conceived and/or recognized, married or not. The spine of the family is therefore essentially filiation, while the marriage of the parents becomes somewhat accessory.

In this context, one wonders whether true equality would not apply to all the same rights: that of marrying adults and, for all children, a filiation established according to the same criteria and the same rules.

But this would not be the case if one distinguished a “homoparentalité” and a “heteroparentalité”, namely two parents of the same sex or different sexes.

The ability of anyone to be a “good parent” is obviously not in question. Many homosexuals also have children with a partner of the other sex and do not claim to base their paternity or maternity on their homosexuality. Conversely, homosexual relationships would mean that homosexual love establishes a possible kinship and makes it possible to replace the sexual heterogeneity of the father and the mother with the male or female homosexuality of the parents.

Formulas, now common, of gay and lesbian parents mean the same thing. And when the minister of the family announces that it will be necessary to question “the new forms of filiations as heterosexual as homosexual”, it also substitutes for the sexual character of the parents their orientation “sexual”. It is therefore important to create a new model of parentage.

According to the traditional model, a child is attached to at least one parent, usually the mother who gave birth and, if possible, the father and mother. Including adoption, legal parentage reproduces analogically the procreative, asymmetrical and heterogeneous couple. It retains its structure, or scheme, that of biogenic design. This is how anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss can be understood when he writes that “biological links are the model on which kinship relations are conceived”. But note that this model is neither logical nor mathematical (of the type: 1 + 1), but biological and therefore qualitative (woman + man) because the two are not interchangeable. This is the only reason why parents are two or are a couple.

Even if this form is not always fulfilled (for example when a child has only one parent or is adopted by a single person), the sexual difference is marked symbolically, that is to say named by the words “father” or “mother” who designate distinct people and places. This distinction places the child in an order where the generations succeed one another through the sexual generation, and the common finitude is thus meant to him because nobody can not beget alone by being both father and mother.

The question then arises of knowing what is meant by a child attached, hypothetically, to two mothers or two fathers. Does this cumulation mean that two fathers can replace the mother? That two mothers can replace the father? A lesbian activist, who does not want to add a father to his female couple, testifies in a magazine: “Two parents, that’s enough.” And another: “I do not want to steal a father to be a mother.” How can one not hear here a virulent negation of the finitude and incompleteness of each of the two sexes?

The fear that can be expressed here is precisely that two parents of the same sex do not symbolize, in their eyes as those of their adopted children (and even more of those who would be procreated with the help of biological material), a denial of the limit that each of the two sexes has for the other, a limit that love can not erase.