Creating Embryos for Use in Stem Cell Research

The intense and extensive debate over human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research has focused primarily on the moral status of the human embryo. Some commentators assign full moral status of normal adult human beings to the embryo from the moment of its conception. At the other extreme are those who believe that a human embryo has no significant moral status at the time it is used and destroyed in stem cell research. And in between are many intermediate positions that assign an embryo some degree of moral status between none and full. This controversy and the respective positions, like the abortion controversy, is by now well understood, despite the lack of progress in resolving it. I have argued briefly elsewhere that early embryos do not have significant moral status, but I do not want to reenter that debate here. Instead, I want to focus on an issue that has had relatively little explicit and separate attention, but is likely to loom larger in light of the Obama administration’s partial lifting of the Bush administration’s restriction on the embryos that can be used in stem cell research that receives federal funding.