APPENDIX 62
Memorandum from Professor Julian Savulescu,
University of Oxford
1. Legislation is currently overly restrictive
of scientific research and reproduction.
2. The embryo does not acquire a moral status
until it becomes a conscious fetus at around 20 weeks gestation.
This explains why our society is permissive towards early abortion.
3. There are no moral objections to destructive
embryo research until the fetus acquires moral status. (Otherwise,
consistency would require us to restrict access to abortion services.)
4. There is a moral imperative based on
the benefit to future people to engage in embryonic research,
including basic research into new forms of reproduction such as
cloning which may yield invaluable insights into cellular development,
maturation, aging and death.
5. There are no moral objections to reproductive
technologies on the basis that they result in the death of embryos.
6. The only valid objection to either research
or reproductive technology is that it makes an embryo that would
otherwise have existed worse off in virtue of the intervention,
that is, harms the embryo.
7. The crucial role for regulation in this
area is to prevent harm to the embryo. For example, if a test
on an embryo render a healthy embryo disabled, then that would
be a reason to prevent access to that test. The reason is that
a future individual will be harmed. If a test result in the loss
of an embryo, that would not be a reason to prevent access to
that test—the embryo does not have a present moral status.
8. There should be a strong presumption
in favour of procreative autonomy, which I define as the right
to decide when to have children, how many children to have, how
to have children and what kind of children to have.
9. The only significant grounds for limiting
procreative autonomy are on the basis of significant public interest,
that is, serious harm to individuals in society (not mere disapproval)
or harm to a future child by making that child worse off than
it could have been.
10. Since reproductive technologies select
which children will come into existence, even if those children
have worse lives than average, that is not a reason to restrict
the technology since they would not have otherwise have existed.
11. The decision to foreseeably have a child
who will have worse life opportunities than another different
child is a wrong but interference in the decision is only justified
if there is a significant interest of that particular child in
not being born at all (and a different child being born) or a
public interest.
12. There are no reasons to prevent people
from non-traditional uses of AR:
(a) To enable HIV positive women to have
a child;
(b) For HIV discordant couples where the
male partner is HIV positive;
(c) To enable gay couples or single women;
(d) Freezing eggs and embryos for lifestyle
reasons;
(e) Creating "saviour siblings"
to serve as stem cell donors for sick siblings;
(f) Selection against carriers, adult onset
conditions, short stature;
(g) Selecting for disability; and
(h) Sex selection using either sperm sorting
or PGD.
October 2004
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