Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology / Chairman: Dame Mary Warnock, DBE.

  • Great Britain. Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology.
Date:
1984
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology / Chairman: Dame Mary Warnock, DBE. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    including surrogacy, which can cause public concern. We have also considered artificial insemination, which, though practised in this country for many years, is not universally accepted ethi- cally, nor indeed regulated by law. There were, however, some matters which, though in some sense related, fell outside our terms of reference. Chief among these were abortion and con- traception. We have not concerned ourselves directly with these, although the present state of the law in relation to them has been a necessary point of reference in discussions. 1.4 Within the terms of reference we were given two words that had to be clarified. The first of these was embryology. While the term “‘embryo”’ has been variously defined in considering human embryology, we have taken as our starting point the meeting of egg and sperm at fertilisation. We have regarded the embryonic stage to be the six weeks immediately following fertilisation which usually corresponds with the first eight weeks of gestation counted from the first day of the woman’s last menstrual period. 1.5 The second word in need of clarification was potential. The pace of scientific discovery is unpredictable. Indeed, a number of major developments has taken place during the lifetime of the Inquiry. The changes which take place in society itself are also difficult to predict. The impact of scientific dis- coveries on the society of the future is therefore doubly hard to predict. We took the pragmatic view that we could react only to what we knew, and what we could realistically foresee. This meant that we must react to the ways in which people now see childlessness and the process of family formation, taking into account the range of views encompassed by our pluralistic society, the nature and value of clinical and scientific advances and the benefits of research. Methods of working 1.6 We found it convenient to divide our task into two parts. The first concerned processes designed to benefit the individual within society who faced a particular problem, namely infertility; the second concerned the pursuit of knowledge, much of it designed to benefit society at large rather than the individual. The distinction is not absolute. One cannot divorce pursuit of an individual’s goals from the goals of society as a whole and, moreover, policies undertaken for the public good a