New Beginnings

In Experiments in Democracy, Observatory Co-Director Ben Hurlbut traces a history of the American debates, forms of reasoning, norms, and institutional struggles that have faced the moral status of the human embryo and justified its use for research purposes. In the first chapter, he examines the ethics and politics of reproductive rights and research in the US, from the mid-1960s to 1980. Hurlbut focuses on the federal bioethics bodies created to address scientific advances in human in vitro fertilization and embryo culture, particularly the Ethics Advisory Board (EAB) constituted in 1978 to provide a case-by-case review of ethically complex research proposals. His analysis shows the role and rationales of different members of the EAB in drawing an analogy between artificial and natural reproduction as a strategy of limiting the range of ethical questions and avoiding the problem of the moral status of the embryo, justifying the creation of embryos that would be discarded. Nevertheless, it confronted moral status in a limited way. Two of its least principled determinations—on the embryo’s moral status and on a 14-day limit to in vitro embryo culture—proved to be its most consequential contributions. Hurlbut describes the arbitrary origin of the 14-day limit, in part due to convenience and pragmatism. The EAB was dissolved in 1980, beginning a de facto moratorium on human embryo research that lasted until 1993.