Although it has been incubating for a long time, the debate on the legalisation of gestational surrogacy has never been so topical : with the 2004 law on bioethics to be revised this year, supporters and detractors of surrogate mothers have been making their voices heard for the last month.

Carrying someone else's baby is a practice as old as the world itself. But for the last twenty years or so, the techniques of in-vitro fertilisation and artificial insemination have made possible gestational surrogacy, the act of carrying a child conceived outside of a sexual union, with the ovocytes of another woman.

Illegal in France, this practice is authorised abroad. The Mennesson couple, whose twin girls were carried by a Californian woman in 2000 and who still do not have a civil status in France, are moving their fight from the field of media to the political field.

Their call for the legalisation of gestational surrogacy launched at the end of March has collected 300 signatures, including that of many prominent people (politicians, legal practitioners, psychoanalysts, doctors…).

Opposing them, the « anti » group, made up of Catholics, feminists or doctors, is rallied around the philosopher Sylviane Agacinski who has just published a virulent book, Corps en miettes (Body in Bits) (Flammarion).

[pic]Who is concerned ?

Couples with fertility problems do not always have recourse to gestational surrogacy. Far from it. It is for those couples among whom the woman has no uterus and for whom it is the only solution (apart from adoption, the difficulties of which are well known) to have a child. At least this is the case in all the countries in which GS is authorised, as illegal practices are developing notably in India where it is possible to « have a baby made » for 10,000€.

The surrogate mother is implanted with an embryo from the genitors (the oocytes of the natural mother, or of an anonymous donor if the mother does not have any, which have been