ABSTRACT
In devising legislation to regulate the use of assisted conception technologies over the course of the 1980s, the overriding concern for British parliamentarians was the necessity to establish limits on embryo research. That there is ‘something special’ about human embryos, and that there must be limits to what can be done to them, were two of the most consistent points of consensus throughout a debate characterised by a widely diverse and passionately contested range of views. Specifying precise limits to embryo research proved a lengthy and exhaustive parliamentary process. Yet, not only were such limits agreed upon, but the enactment of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in Britain in 1990 established one of the most substantial legislative precedents achieved anywhere in the world in the politically fraught, scientifically complex and uniquely emotive area of new reproductive technologies (NRTs).1
