Britain's HFEA Is Caught in the Middle

Alastair V. Campbell

Hastings Center Report, Volume 35, Number 3, May-June 2005, p. 8 (Article)

Published by The Hastings Center

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hcr.2005.0055

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/186184

[ Access provided at 3 Oct 2020 03:39 GMT from University of Nottingham ]


Britain’s HFEA Is Caught in the Middle
T he publication in March of this
year of Human Reproductive Tech-
nologies and the Law, a report by the
House of Commons’ Science and Tech-
nology Committee, provoked a power-
ful reaction in the British press. More
extreme reactions described it as a
“Frankenstein” report, while less violent
comments saw it as excessively libertari-
an, or simply as lacking any substantial
ethical basis for its conclusions.
The reactions stemmed from three of
the report’s conclusions: that a total pro-
hibition on reproductive cloning has
not been justified by ethical arguments
(although the current concerns about
welfare and safety warrant a temporary
ban), that the welfare of the child provi-
sion in the current Human Fertilisation
and Embryology Act is discriminatory
against the infertile and should be
dropped, and that sex selection of em-
bryos should be considered for social,
not only for medical, reasons. The re-
port also recommends that a recent rul-
ing on removing the anonymity of ga-
mete donors should be revisited and
that the Human Fertilisation and Em-
bryology Authority, which oversees all
reproductive technology and embryo re-
search in the United Kingdom, should
be reduced to a technical regulatory au-
thority. Ethical policy issues would be-
come the domain of a new parliamen-
tary ethics committee.
These are certainly radical sugges-
tions, most of them echoing the well-
publicized views of some British
bioethicists, notably John Harris and
Julian Savulescu. But a closer look at the
report suggests that any fears that the
parliament has turned radically libertar-
ian are premature. House of Commons
select committees, such as the Science
and Technology Committee, are made
up of representatives of the main parties
in the House, with the majority on the
committee (and the chair) drawn from
8 HASTINGS CENTER REPORT
In Brief
the party in power. The Science and
Technology Committee has eleven
members—seven Labour, three Conser-
vative, and one Liberal Democrat. Of
these, one Labour member took no part
in the proceedings because of govern-
ment duties, and five of the remaining
ten members (four of whom were
Labour) dissented from the report. In
any case, select committee reports do
not define government policy (though
they may help to inform it), and the
Labour Government has made it clear
that this report does not reflect its views.
So what is the report’s significance?
Paradoxically, it poses a threat, not to
conservative, but to moderate and liber-
al opinion. Britain has been a pioneer in
the careful regulation of reproductive
technology, following the early identifi-
cation of the ethical issues by the
Warnock Report in 1984. It still holds a
unique place in Europe, providing a
template for many other regulatory
regimes and yet representing a liberal
position on key issues, such as the cre-
ation of embryos for research and the
use of embryonic stem cells, including
those coming from cloned embryos. In
recent years this position has been
under heavy fire from groups in the Eu-
ropean Union who want to see member
states unite in a ban on embryo creation
and embryo research. The United King-
dom has resisted this, pointing to the
moderating position held by the HFEA,
whereby account is given to what
Warnock called “respect” for the human
embryo while permitting some carefully
regulated uses of embryonic material.
This is perhaps a typical British com-
promise—some would say a fudge!—
which prevents a free-for-all in repro-
ductive medicine (like the relatively un-
regulated market in the United States)
yet enables the government to support
and encourage key areas of research cur-
rently banned in the United States and
in parts of Europe.
The rulings of the HFEA have not
always been popular. They sometimes
seem to support public opinion (as in
their stance against sex selection), but
have sometimes been at odds with it.
An example of the latter was the refusal
to allow Diane Blood to use her dead
husband’s sperm, as he had not given
his written consent. The HFEA simply
applied the law, but the public saw it as
inhumane. Throughout, the HFEA has
consistently tried to balance considera-
tions of child welfare against procreative
autonomy, in the spirit of the legislation
under which it was established. Now it
finds itself under fire, not just from the
conservative lobby on these issues, but
from a libertarian view that demands
conclusive proof of harm before a repro-
ductive technology is restricted, reject-
ing the “precautionary approach”—ac-
cording to which those who would in-
troduce a reproductive technology must
show that the technology will not cause
harm—favored in much of Europe. As
it happens, the Department of Health is
itself launching a review of the Human
Fertilisation and Embryology Act, and
it has already announced proposals to
merge the HFEA with the new Human
Tissue Authority. With critics to the
right and to the left, there seems a real
risk that, by a process of attrition, an in-
stitution that has managed to bridge the
gulf between the extreme positions in
reproductive medicine will be rendered
ineffective. This could open the way for
much more conservative policies.
We have, then, the strange spectacle
of some liberal-minded members of
parliament vigorously sawing off the
branch on which they are sitting.
—Alastair V. Campbell
Centre for Ethics in Medicine
University of Bristol
May- June 2005