Till embryonic research does us part!*

The borderline between “humane” and “evil” turns hazy when it comes to issues such as embryo research, cloning and genetic engineering. In so far as abortion remains to be a hot subject in political campaigns, these issues, too, appear not to have a good prospect of bringing the pros and cons to a conclusive agreement any time soon.

Something that makes the debate prevalent among US and EU politicians alike and even more complex, is that both sides involved in the debate claim their point of contention to be ‘life’ itself!

The opponents majorly base their argument against embryo research upon article three of the United Nations human rights declaration: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” Even the Vatican delegation espoused this article rather than taking a more religious stance during the UN 58^th general assembly:

If human rights are to mean anything, at anytime, anywhere in the world, then surely no one can have the right to do such a thing [clone human embryos]. Human rights flow from the recognition that human beings have an intrinsic dignity that is based on the fact that they are human. Human embryos are human, even if they are cloned. If the rest of us are to have the rights that flow from the recognition of this dignity, then we must act to ban cloning in all its forms.

To the better or the worse, the key phrase “the right to life” has opened up an ample space for ambiguous interpretations. Just as seen from the abovementioned quotation the right to life is entitled to embryos at their prenatal stages — a stage that could also be defined as an organismic life stage. Based on that, proponents reason that advancements within the realm of genetic engineering and embryo research can assist humanity in fighting terminal diseases and save millions of lives albeit at the cost of destroying hundreds of thousands of embryos. In his book titled “The Coming of the Body” Le Monde columnist Herve Juvin writes:

When it is possible, or soon will be, to eliminate in advance from a child’s makeup any “leprous” genomes, so called because they carry a tendency to particularly serious illnesses (hemophilia, cancers, asthma, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s Chorea, muscular dystrophy, diabetes…); when future management of health insurance depends to a notable extent on the capacity to conceive and bear children protected against any hereditary illness or defect, and thus on the elimination of the most serious and expensive illnesses; when all these things are with us, only an error of vocabulary can explain why the word “reproduction” is still applied to the human species, in  the way it is applied to animal species in the wild.

As stated, the debates have not remained limited to the UN general assemblies and national and international policy-making bodies have also been addressing the subject, too. The European Union is an interesting case in point having two extremes of the debate in its spectrum: on one side The Vatican State (not an EU member per se, but geographically in the EU) and on another side Scotland where Dolly the Sheep was successfully cloned and lived to be 6.

Funding researches on embryo research seems to be the subject of discussion (or a lever against such projects) as far as EU’s stance towards the said issue is concerned. This matter has raised some serious arguments in EU such as when Astrid Thors, the then- Finnish Liberal MEP and currently-Finnish-Minster of Migration and European affairs strongly criticized EU’s ban on Embryo Research funding in 2001 and expressed her dissatisfaction for EU to be “on a par with the Bush administration.” according to Europeansources website.

In 2002 the debates were hot as a row broke out between European Parliament and Council of Ministers over a temporary ban on stem cell and human embryo research. Things started to get even more complicated for pros against the cons in 2003 as MEPs introduced even more limiting amendments to the already-existings-curbs. David Bowe a UK Labour deputy lamented: "Regrettably, the religious right managed to pass a series of amendments which, if they ever become law, would have serious consequences for stem cell research in Europe; they [the MEPs] are very Catholic and very regressive."

Just as the debate was ongoing among EU members, in 2006 President Bush went far enough to use his veto power to limit federal funding for the research according to a BBC report. The same report lists the “keen” and “not keen” countries in about stem cell research in EU as follows: 

·NOT KEEN: Austria, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Slovakia

·KEEN: Belgium, Finland, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, UK

Just recently as the a new repercussion of the EU’s legislation on embryonic research, a court in Germany ruled that “totipotent cells carrying within them the capacity to evolve into a complete human being must be legally classified as human embryos and must therefore be excluded from patentability.” That single sentence would arguably delay developments towrds reaching a promising cure for many terminal illnesses in the near future.

All that said, it does not appear perceptible for the European Union to take a different direction in regards to the embryonic research and how it could be addressed given all the legal aspects and the diversity evident within the various member states of the EU. So far the score results show 1-0 in favor of the Pope’s team against Dolly’s!

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* This article was written in fulfilment of an academic module requirement in 2011