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.
In Embryo Politics, Thomas Banchoff provides a comprehensive overview of political struggles aboutembryo research during four decades in four countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. Banchoff's book, the first of its kind, demonstrates the impact of particular national histories and institutions on very different patterns of national governance. Over time, he 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.
Thomas Banchoff is Director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and Professor in the Department of Government and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics, and Foreign Policy, 1945–1995, editor of Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics and Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism, and coeditor of Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights and Legitimacy and the European Union: The Contested Polity.
Table of Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 The Emergence of Ethical Controversy 21
2 First Embryo Research Regimes 70
3 The Ethics of Embryonic Stem Cell Research 120
4 Stem Cell and Cloning Politics 169
Conclusion 233
Bibliography 259
Index 283
What People are Saying About This
John H. Evans
In Embryo Politics, Thomas Banchoff summarizes a very large amount of data to make a cohesive argument about embryo debates in four countries over forty years. It is a masterly accomplishment.
Richard Ashcroft
Commentators have often noted that debates about embryo research are inherently political, but before now we have had no reliable guide to the contours and history of this politics. Thomas Banchoff has produced the definitive work, not only on embryo politics but also on the politics of bioethics generally. We are all in his debt.
