ABSTRACT
In 1988, early in the history of human in vitro fertilization (IVF), a bioethics commentator suggested that the bodies of brain-dead women could, with hormonal assistance, provide suitable incubation for implanted embryos, to bring them to term. Dr Paul Gerber, a medical law academic, argued ‘I can’t see anything wrong with it, and at least the dead would be doing some good’, adding that such a development would represent ‘a magnificent use of a corpse’. The front page newspaper article which reported his claim, added: ‘A specialist in reproductive physiology … said that a neomort would probably be able to sustain a pregnancy. “I can’t see any reason why the pregnancy shouldn’t go ahead normally, as long as the female incubator is receiving the appropriate nutrients and care”, said the specialist, who preferred to remain unnamed’. 1 In response, the inaugural chair of the world’s first IVF regulatory committee, lawyer Professor Louis Waller, responded: ‘If these women are dead, then bury them decently. That’s what we do with dead people in our society’. 2 The matter was apparently not publicly discussed again. Yet notwithstanding Professor Waller’s assertion that there exists an underlying social consensus about what might constitute a limit case in medical ethics, the article itself shows no such consensus, thus his statement needs to be read more for rhetorical force than factuality.
