[Reproductive medicine and the « desire for a child »: from normative judgment to conceptual analysis]

Reproductive medicine is widely discussed today in France, far beyond the borders of medical community. It is a topic of public controversy. The notion of "desire for a child" is very frequently referred to in this debate. It is wrongly considered as an obvious idea. A philosophical examination of the "desire for a child" allows us to elaborate a critical definition of it, cut from the normative judgments made about it. It highlights its double nature, being a desire linked to the private sphere as well as to public policies and social norms. It gives some reasons to understand how it became something that could be said and even claimed for in the public sphere. It examines the explanations that have been proposed about the desire for a child (its origin, the goal it fulfills). It proposes a frame of analysis based on a case-by-case approach and acknowledges as essential features of this desire its complexity, its ambiguous frontiers and its variability. The normative evaluation of the "desire for a child" cannot skip the phase of this conceptual analysis.