Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies
Thomas Banchoff
Abstract
Since the first fertilization of a human egg in the laboratory in 1968, scientific and technological breakthroughs have raised ethical dilemmas and generated policy controversies on both sides of the Atlantic. Embryo, stem cell, and cloning research have provoked impassioned political debate about their religious, moral, legal, and practical implications. National governments make rules that govern the creation, destruction, and use of embryos in the laboratory—but they do so in profoundly different ways. This book provides a comprehensive overview of political struggles about embryo research ... More
Since the first fertilization of a human egg in the laboratory in 1968, scientific and technological breakthroughs have raised ethical dilemmas and generated policy controversies on both sides of the Atlantic. Embryo, stem cell, and cloning research have provoked impassioned political debate about their religious, moral, legal, and practical implications. National governments make rules that govern the creation, destruction, and use of embryos in the laboratory—but they do so in profoundly different ways. This book provides a comprehensive overview of political struggles about embryo research during four decades in four countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. It demonstrates the impact of particular national histories and institutions on very different patterns of national governance. Over time, the book argues, partisan debate and religious–secular polarization have come to overshadow ethical reflection and political deliberation on the moral status of the embryo and the promise of biomedical research. Only by recovering a robust and public ethical debate will we be able to govern revolutionary life-science technologies effectively and responsibly into the future.
Keywords:
human egg,
embryo research,
stem cell research,
cloning research,
ethics,
biomedical research,
revolutionary technology,
life-science technologies
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780801449574 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: August 2016 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9780801449574.001.0001 |
