Negotiating Meanings About Embryos in Australia: From Potential Humans to Prohibited Substances

In the late 1990s, human embryonic stem-cell research became a highly emotional and politicized debate. In 2001, the United States announced a ban on all federal funding for research involving human embryos, and other countries around the world were similarly engaged in political debate at the same time, and for very similar reasons—namely, that embryos are regarded as unique entities that warrant special protection. This article tracks the transformations in the history of legislative response in Australia to the anxieties provoked by the use of reproductive and regenerative human material over the last 40 years, in order to examine how embryos have come to adopt such a special position in the community’s psyche. “The embryo” is at once a biological, scientific, social, cultural, and political object, fixed by the legislative processes that seek to define it, and subject to definitions that change over time. Understanding the history of where our ideas about the embryo have come from can help us to negotiate the continuing debate about the use of human embryos in research.