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Compromise and Moral Complicity in the Embryonic Stem Cell Debate

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Philosophical Reflections on Medical Ethics

Abstract

In September 2004, Italy’s health minister, Girolamo Sirchia, hailed the successful treatment of a five-year-old boy with thalassaemia, an inherited form of life-threatening anaemia. The therapy involved transplanting stem cells of the umbilical cord blood of the boy’s newborn twin siblings. The minister hoped to use this case to convince the Italian public of the potential of non-embryo-derived stem cells and to justify the contentious Italian law on assisted reproduction. However, soon after his ‘triumph’ it became known that the twin pregnancy was realised with IVF and the selection of embryos through PGD and HLA typing, in a hospital in Turkey, techniques which Sirchia considers as immoral and which are outlawed by the Italian government.2

The authors acknowledge the stimulus and support of two European Commission-funded projects. They are ‘The Ethics of Stem Cell Research and Therapy in Europe (Eurostem)’, and the ‘European Project on Delimiting the Research Concept and the Research Activities (EU-RECA)’, both sponsored by the European Commission, DG-Research, 5th and 6th Framework respectively.

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Notes

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  58. J. R. Richards (1982) made this point well in The Sceptical Feminist (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books). Note also the similarities between this argument and Athanassoulis’s point on the sanctity of life in Chapter 8 in this volume.

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Authors
  1. Katrien Devolder
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  2. John Harris
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Professional Ethics, Keele University, UK

    Nafsika Athanassoulis (Lecturer in Ethics) (Lecturer in Ethics)

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© 2005 Katrien Devolder and John Harris

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Devolder, K., Harris, J. (2005). Compromise and Moral Complicity in the Embryonic Stem Cell Debate. In: Athanassoulis, N. (eds) Philosophical Reflections on Medical Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230273931_5

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