Regulating the New Reproductive Technologies: A Cross-Channel Comparison

Abstract

In Britain and in France medical developments in the new reproductive technologies (NRTS) have proceeded at a similar pace. Both countries have been at the forefront of progress. Statutes seeking to answer the dilemmas posed by that progress were passed in 1990 in Britain and in 1994 in France. These have in some respects been markedly different. The process of legislating to regulate assisted conception has proved to be much more problematic in France than in Britain due to the ambitions of the French and the existence of Constitutional rights which impinged on the substance of any new laws. The outcome in three key areas of the debate, namely controlling access to assisted conception, defining parenthood and defining the status of the embryo, reveals fundamental divisions between understandings of law and culture in these two major European states. Taken as a whole the three laws of 1994 in France, for example, afford protection much more substantially to the child and the embryo than the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. What this paper seeks to do then is to explore the response in France and Britain to these three issues, to evaluate the reasons for each jurisdiction's response to them and finally, perhaps intrepidly, to conclude whether France or Britain has offered the better solution to the problems of modern reproductive medicine.