Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies by Thomas Banchoff (review)

The first successful human in vitro fertilization, by Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe at Cambridge University in 1968, generated some media attention but no ethical or political debate. As Thomas Banchoff notes in Embryo Politics, "the human embryo only slowly emerged as an object of ethical controversy" (p. 21). This lucid and well-written book relates a comparative history of this controversy in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

Banchoff argues that two distinct periods can be discerned. In the first, from around 1968 through around 1996, the primary medical use of human embryos was for infertility treatment. Ethical debates centered around the moral status attributed to embryos as human life. The second period was shaped by the successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells, first accomplished in 1998 at the University of Wisconsin. This development shifted the discussion of the potential benefits of embryo research from relatively narrow applications in infertility treatment to potential blockbuster applications in disease-curing research and therapeutic cloning. In this period, an "ethic of healing" (p. 172) and worries about the dystopian possibilities posed by cloning dominated the debate.

Banchoff compares developments in these two periods across four "Atlantic democracies." He argues that "National historical and institutional legacies" (p. 13) generated quite different politics in the four countries. In the first phase, a powerful anti-abortion movement in the United States linked the issue of embryo personhood to the abortion issue, resulting in public-private split: a ban on federally funded, but not on privately funded, research. Germany, which associated embryo research with Nazi eugenic and medical abuses, adopted the most conservative regime: a total ban on embryo research. France also adopted a ban, though based on a secular humanist commitment to human rights and dignity. The United Kingdom took the most liberal approach. Anti-abortion forces, though present, were not nearly as strong as in the United States, the Catholic population was smaller, and even British conservatives were excited by the medical potential of embryo research.

In the second phase, anti-research forces lost ground. Pro-research forces were able to promise potential cures for a wide variety of devastating diseases, and to represent the curing of disease as just as "pro-life" as the protection of embryos. France changed the most, moving from a total ban to a five-year trial period in which the derivation of embryonic stem cells for therapeutic purposes would be permitted. The United States maintained its peculiarly American public-private split, with President George W. Bush's famous 2001 decision to limit federal embryonic research funding to sixty existing stem-cell lines. Germany remained the most conservative, allowing research on imported embryos but not the domestic derivation of embryonic stem cells. The United Kingdom remained the most liberal regime. Of particular interest were the attempts to control the debate through language, such as proposals to call therapeutic cloning "nuclear substitution" and to call a cloned embryo a "clonote," an "activated egg," an "ovasome," or a "pre-embryo" (pp. 146-47).

Banchoff argues that "in keeping with the idea of a value-free social science," it is important that he not take a position on the debate over embryo research. On one issue, however, he does take a normative position: he argues forcefully that the quality of the debate eroded in the second phase. He contends that in the first phase both sides acknowledged that their adversaries had compelling interests as well. In the second phase, the debate "degenerated too often into charges and countercharges." (p. 237) Research proponents, Banchoff argues, refused to acknowledge the moral status of embryos. And opponents of research ignored embryonic stem-cell research's compelling potential to alleviate human suffering.

Embryo Politics aims to be a "straight history": it does not seek to use its case study to explicate the relationship between science and technology and politics, as does, for example, Sheila Jasanoff 's shorter treatment of the second-phase...