ABSTRACT
In the chapters of this book I have tried to show the possibilities – both positive and negative – that shape the landscape of contemporary health law, and the ways that the patterns of our lives intersect and overlap in a variety of unruly ways that present constant new challenges for law and ethics. Assisted reproductive technologies have reconfigured our lives, and our futures, by bringing together strangers through gamete donation in ways that are designed simultaneously to be both deeply personal (the creation of a child) and emotionally distant (donor anonymity). Our sense of certainty about the moral status of a human embryo has been cast adrift by scientific developments which allow us to choose whether an embryo should have the potential to develop into a child or whether the embryo should be used in more instrumental ways to develop stem cells that may, in turn, potentially offer new therapeutic possibilities for the treatment of illness and disease. Cloning technologies present their own set of challenges and, despite the widespread condemnation of cloning of whole humans through reproductive cloning, the question of whether a clone can have human dignity remains a complex and vexed question. While our children may still be gifts from nature, the ability to choose between gifts through preimplantation genetic diagnosis of embryos has added new ethical complexities to reproductive decision-making. While it is perhaps true that, far more than any generation before us, we hold the keys to humanity in our hands, through both genetic technologies and reproductive technologies, there is little consensus about which doors should be unlocked using those keys.
