4.1.1 We have seen that there are solid grounds for acknowledging the embryo as a human moral subject: an individual who has human interests and, therefore, basic human rights. What, then, are the basic rights of human beings as they apply to the embryo? We should distinguish, first of all, between the positive rights and the negative rights of human beings.
4.1.2 Human beings have positive rights, that is, rights that other people make certain choices which concern them: to provide them with medical treatment, for example, or some other portion of the communal resources. While these rights are very important, it is clear that they do not apply in all situations where help might be needed. It is easy to imagine situations where there are more patients than a doctor can treat, and no patient has more right to treatment than any other. It would therefore be wrong to say that each patient has an absolute right to be treated; the doctor must simply distribute resources as best he or she can.
4.1.3 In contrast, the rights that human beings have absolutely are certain negative rights: rights that other people not deliberately harm them. For example, people have the right not to be intentionally killed (at least if they are innocent of violence or serious injustice). In the same way, people have the right not to have their bodies harmfully invaded; for example, not to have their organs harvested while they are alive.
4.1.4 As the embryo is a human moral subject, it too has the negative rights of an innocent human being. It has the right not to be deliberately killed, and not to have its body deliberately invaded in ways which do it lethal harm. The process of harvesting its cells, in the course of which the embryo dies, is no more permissible than extracting organs from a newborn child who dies as a result.
4.1.5 The embryo also has certain positive rights to shelter and nourishment from its mother. A pregnant mother has an extra reason to take care of her own health, for the sake of her unborn baby. She should also take reasonable steps to provide for the child's growth and development, by eating appropriately, for example.
4.1.6 Given that a mother has certain responsibilities to her child, it is clearly wrong for a mother (or father) to permit embryos to be conceived in vitro who will not have a chance of being born. Parents who have had children by IVF normally consider the embryo to be a child or potential child.31 It is clearly irresponsible to accept the status of parenthood in this way and at the same time neglect the “spare” embryos who have been conceived.
4.2.1 In a typical course of IVF treatment, some embryos will be conceived who will be surplus to a couple's requirements. In the case of these embryos, who would otherwise be discarded, it may be thought that they are “going to die anyway”, and should therefore serve some purpose, rather than be wasted altogether. We should note that this approach would not be accepted in the case of other human beings who are threatened with imminent destruction. In the case of prisoners on death row, or patients who are dying but not yet dead, we can see how disrespectful - and how dangerous - it would be to use them as live organ “donors'.
4.2.2 In any case, we need to ask why IVF embryos are created in such lavish numbers. Leaving aside other questionable aspects of the IVF process, it is surely unethical practice deliberately to produce greater numbers of embryos than will be transferred to the mother.
4.2.3 Potential parents seeking fertility treatment are in a vulnerable position and it is difficult for them to object to the use of their embryonic offspring for research into infertility. The dangers inherent in using patients for medical research into their own condition are well documented. The Helsinki declaration on research on human subjects, as emended at Edinburgh in 2000, states that “[s]pecial attention is required for those for whom the research is combined with care” (para. 8). The 1989 Hong Kong version was even clearer: “The subjects should be volunteers - either healthy persons or patients for whom the experimental design is not related to the patient's illness.” [III.2 Helsinki 1964 as revised 1975, 1983 and 1989] Even if destructive embryo research were acceptable in principle, analogous considerations would mitigate against using any embryos supplied by patients undergoing a course of fertility treatment. The situation of need or dependence tends to undermine freedom of consent.
4.3.1 One step beyond experimentation on surplus IVF embryos is the deliberate creation of IVF embryos for experimental use. Here there is no pretence that any embryo produced will be given a chance of survival. It is not a case of bringing some good out of the supposed accident of too many IVF embryos; it is creation for destruction.
4.3.2 Conceiving IVF embryos for research compounds the disrespect shown towards them. The industrial or commercial exploitation of embryos is a further violation of their rights. It involves treating embryos as livestock to be farmed, managed, traded and slaughtered. The degradation of the IVF embryo conceived for research lies not simply in its early destruction but in the whole context within which the embryo lives out its brief existence.
4.3.3 With the recent expansion of the legal grounds on which embryo research may be performed, IVF for research seems likely to become much more common in the future. As research expands it is inevitable that there will be calls to extend the period of embryonic development within which it is permitted, particularly if cells from early embryos prove difficult to manage. If research is permitted on human embryos, how long before it is seriously suggested that research should be extended to human foetuses?
4.4.1 Cloning for the purpose of research is an area of special concern. As with IVF for the purpose of research, it is intended not to allow the embryo to live longer than the experiment dictates. Already in the case of IVF - even IVF to treat infertile couples - the embryo risks being treated as a product or commodity, since the procedure itself involves a process of manufacture. In the case of cloning, the method of production would be further dehumanized. The clone embryo would have no genetic parents, and would be created like a product to precise specifications. Having no parents in the normal sense, the clone would have no natural human protectors, and would be still more vulnerable than the IVF embryo today.
4.4.2 Cloning for research is the same procedure as cloning for birth, and already involves the decision to produce a human clone, although the clone will then be destroyed. The technical expertise developed in cloning for research will certainly assist those who want to clone for birth. Thus, if cloning for birth is regarded as objectionable (see below [4.6]), cloning for research must also be so regarded.
4.5.1 If the expansion of destructive research on IVF embryos and the initiation of cloning for research is allowed to go ahead, this will generate further moral problems concerning the issue of complicity in these activities. It is morally wrong not only to destroy human beings, but also to commission or authorize their destruction. Cloning and stem cell research create serious problems of conscience for doctors, patients, researchers and those asked to donate material to produce embryos for research. For example, a patient who supplies a cell for the purpose of creating a clone would be intending the destruction of the clone for the sake of harvesting its cells.
4.5.2 Complicity problems are not limited to cases where one intends the wrongdoing of others. Even those who do not intend an act of injustice can act wrongly themselves by giving the impression they condone it, if what they do is closely linked to such an act. Thus a patient might be acting wrongly if he or she accepted a stem cell treatment - even one which did not itself destroy embryos - if that treatment had been developed by means of the destruction of embryos.
4.5.3 If the only treatment developed for a serious medical condition is one that involves, or has involved, the creation and destruction of embryos, this will condemn conscientious physicians and patients to endure a cruel trial. Unless they act against their conscience - and do what they consider inhuman and barbaric - patients will suffer without hope of treatment and doctors will be unable to offer any alternative. This situation would be intolerable.
4.5.4 Consider alternative avenues of research where one might lead to successful treatment which would be universally welcomed, while the other, even if it led to successful treatment, would create problems of conscience for thousands of patients and physicians. If the research possibilities are as yet uncertain, then it is particularly unfair to pursue research that, if successful, will be unconscionable to a significant proportion of the population. This is especially so in an age of integrated national healthcare provision. It is invidious to alienate so many people from the healthcare system.
4.5.5 Foetal tissue can be obtained from foetuses who have miscarried spontaneously, with the permission of the parents. In the case of taking tissue from aborted foetuses, it is often claimed that the act of abortion can be separated from subsequent research on tissue from the foetus, in such a way as to make this research morally acceptable. This claim is somewhat disingenuous: the mere presence of an intermediary between the abortionist and the researcher does not mean there is not a close link between their activities.32 In any event, with regard to stem cell research on early embryos, it is not possible to dissociate the embryo destruction from the research, since the embryo would be destroyed by the very scientist who does the experiment.
4.5.6 Abortion may be linked to stem cell research, not only as a way of obtaining cells directly, but also as a means of supplying ova for the creation of clone or IVF embryos. Adult women are currently reluctant to allow their ova to be used to create embryos for research. It has been suggested that ova from a young aborted female could be appropriated - thus treating her body and fertility as a mere means to an end. Not only would the embryo created from the foetal ovum be treated as if it were an object, but the embryo would be the offspring of a foetus who was herself treated in this way.
4.6.1 Though cloning for birth does not involve the intention to destroy all the offspring created (and, in this respect, is better than cloning for research), it would nonetheless be seriously wrong for a host of other reasons.
4.6.2 The first objection to cloning for birth is the physical harm it would cause in cloned human beings. The experience of attempting to clone other mammals shows that the great majority of human clones would have genetically related disabilities. Some nuclear replacement would not result in a true human embryo, but in an entity with no developmental potential. If embryos were created, most would have severe abnormalities, some of which would only become apparent late in pregnancy. Screening for genetic abnormality would “eliminate” a proportion of such abnormalities, but only at the cost of eliminating the unborn child itself. Of the babies born alive, many would suffer from disabilities inflicted on them irresponsibly because of the means used to produce them.
4.6.3 Nor is it only the child who would be abused in such experimental reproduction. Those women who chose to gestate a cloned child would risk the trauma of a very high rate of miscarriage, the trauma of being offered abortion when severe abnormalities were detected in utero, and the health risks of a difficult and atypical pregnancy. Whatever the motives of women who chose to take part, it would be irresponsible of the scientists to impose such risks on any human subject.
4.6.4 Even if cloning for birth was carried out in a large enough number of cases for the risks to be substantially reduced, this could only happen at the cost of many dead foetuses, many disabled infants and many pregnant women who had suffered excessively en route to making cloning safe.
4.6.5 Added to these serious but extrinsic reasons for objecting to cloning for birth is the intrinsic objection that it is demeaning to the cloned child. The reaction of unease or revulsion which is generated by the idea of creating multiple genetically identical copies of an existing person is not something which should be dismissed as irrational.33 Our natural reactions can sometimes be a guide to important human values. In the case of human procreation there seems to be a symbolic as well as a practical value to the novelty generated by sexual reproduction. Family resemblance leaves symbolic room for novelty and individuality.
4.6.6 Human beings are not, of course, reducible to their genes,34 and a cloned child would be as distinct from his or her genetic original as identical twins are distinct from one another. Nevertheless, deliberately producing people to resemble an existing person would make them seem like replacements, and this would undermine their quest for individuality and make them appear, to themselves and to society, as (replaceable) “copies” rather than as (irreplaceable) originals. Identical twins are not deliberately produced to resemble each other, nor is there an age-gap between them. In contrast, a cloned child would always be a copy,35 deliberately produced so as to fulfill the potential already demonstrated by another.
4.6.7 The cloned child would be produced without genetic parents, as a copy of some existing person, perhaps someone who had recently died (a replacement child), or perhaps someone still alive (a “designer baby'). Even if the clone survived to live a healthy life, he or she would live in the shadow of the person cloned, under pressure to be like the person he or she was made to resemble. This compromises the interest of children in establishing a separate identity for themselves; it subjects the child's freedom unreasonably to the parents” desires. Irrespective of the psychological harm to the child which might or might not follow, cloning is intrinsically a form of excessive parental control, since the child is created as a copy of someone chosen by the parents.36
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