(1) Artifical reproductive technologies, stem cell research and, to some extent, PGD make it necessary to reconsider the moral status of the embryo as they all depend on the destruction of at least some embryos. Unlike the abortion debate, which pitted the moral status of embryos against women’s right to self-determination, bioethical conflicts set an entire array of different values and interests against whatever rights we think the embryo might have. These values and interests range from furthering medical and scientific progress, to an interest in having a biologically related child, to ensuring healthy offspring and being able to cure certain illnesses, such as leukemia or alzheimers, in already born persons. This calls certain previous commitments to the embryo into question, since it can no longer be argued that its moral status was outweighed by the exceptional importance of women’s right to self-determination.
(2) Technologies such as PGD and genetic manipulation harbor entirely new problems: not only is it possible to select embryos with certain genetic predispositions in the petri-dish, but it will soon be feasable to fundamentally affect the genetic composition of the next generation. This new mode of intervention aggravates the already existing power asymmetry between the generations in which those already living can determine the existence of future people and the circumstances into which they are born. This raises the question of whether this new power ought to be translated into an entitlement of parents to genetically interfere and enhance their children, which is an assumption frequently shared by liberal eugenicists (Buchanan et al. in „From Chance to Choice“, 2000; Dworkin in „Playing God”, 2000), or whether this power should rather urge us to be especially cautious about using it. According to this latter position, the autonomy and equality of future persons can only be respected if one abstains from most interventions into their genome (Habermas in „The Future of Human Nature“, 2002).
