REPORT ON EMBRYO RESEARCH CONFERENCE

N. Ford

Melbourne: 8th June -- The Caroline Chisholm Centre for Health Ethics held a conference on Human Embryo Research, Manipulation & Ethics at St Vincent's Hospital Conference Centre on 24 May.

Scientific experts explained what is involved in human embryo and embryonic stem cell research, therapeutic cloning and preimplantation genetic diagnosis. The meeting was told that research on adult stem cells will soon deliver the desired medical benefits without creating or destroying human embryos.

Keynote speaker Dame Margaret Guilfoyle discussed autonomy, community values and public policy issues. She explained the role of the Infertility Treatment Authority and stressed that autonomy and a sense of personal and social responsibility go together.

The Centre's Director, Dr Norman Ford SDB, explained that utilitarianism should not be the sole criterion of morality for scientific and medical research.

He dismissed the reductionism that sees embryonic human life as no more than genetic products, devoid of significance and value and insisted that the moral necessity to show respect for embryonic human life is a profoundly human insight to protect human embryos which arise from a couple's mutual self-giving and our shared humanity.

Human embryos should be treated as persons from conception. Respect for human embryos should take precedence over pragmatic and utilitarian considerations, even if beneficial medical benefits have to be forgone.

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis followed by selective termination of defective embryos is unethical even if this would result in fewer subsequent abortions and less suffering for disabled children and their carers. The inevitable presence of congenital defects does not at all detract from the dignity of persons so afflicted.

While not every vice needs to be forbidden by law, legal protection should be given for the lives of human embryos whether formed naturally, by IVF or cloned.