ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the nature of harm and how healthcare law is blind to certain forms of harm, and explores how biotechnologies utilise animal bodies. It demonstrates how law and bioethics may selectively manipulate or downplay the notion of harm, and covers the harm inflicted on animals in the name of human health. The chapter argues that healthcare lawyers should foreground the notion of harm, which has been relatively unexplored in contrast to the attention focused on other bioethical concepts, such as autonomy or dignity. It explores the diverse range of harms inflicted on animals by new biotechnologies. The chapter focuses on how healthcare lawyers disregard the ethical problems posed by new forms of human intervention in animal lives to produce transgenic animals. It argues that the notion of what counts as legally harmful may be refashioned in order to accommodate such new forms of harm.
