Abstract
Bioethical debates on the use of human embryos and oocytes for stem cell research have often been criticized for the lack of empirical insights into the perceptions and experiences of the women and couples who are asked to donate these tissues in the IVF clinic. Empirical studies that have investigated the attitudes of IVF patients and citizens on the (potential) donation of their embryos and oocytes have been scarce and have focused predominantly on the situation in Europe and Australia. This article examines the viewpoints on the donation of embryos for stem cell research among IVF patients and students in China. Research into the perceptions of patients is based on in-depth interviews with IVF patients and IVF clinicians. Research into the attitudes of students is based on a quantitative survey study (n=427). The empirical findings in this paper indicate that perceptions of the donation of human embryos for stem cell research in China are far more diverse and complex than has commonly been suggested. Claims that ethical concerns regarding the donation and use of embryos and oocytes for stem cell research are typical for Western societies but absent in China cannot be upheld. The article shows that research into the situated perceptions and cultural specificities of human tissue donation can play a crucial role in the deconstruction of politicized bioethical argumentation and the (often ill-informed) assumptions about “others” that underlie socio-ethical debates on the moral dilemmas of technology developments in the life sciences.
Highlights
The donation and use of human embryos and oocytes for research purposes has, over the last twenty years, sparked off widespread ethical debates at a global scale
It is worthwhile to note that the percentage of people who refuse to donate their embryos for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research in our survey is lower than the results from Jin and colleagues’ study on the views of 363 Chinese IVF couples on the donation of their frozen Bspare^ embryos (Jin et al 2013)
The article has illustrated, in this regard, that Confucian-inspired ideas that a person comes into existence only at the moment of birth do not correspond to the ideas of the overwhelming majority of research participants in this study
Summary
The donation and use of human embryos and oocytes for research purposes has, over the last twenty years, sparked off widespread ethical debates at a global scale. Many of these controversies have focused on the use of these tissues for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research, which involves the destruction of human embryos and the redirecting of their biological potential for scientific, medical, and commercial purposes. A widespread belief at that time was that fewer and fewer human oocytes and embryos would be needed and that the use of iPS cells (which can be generated from human somatic cells) would gradually replace the significance of hESC. With the creation of the first hESC line from somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) in 2013 (Tachibana et al 2013), and more recently the use of human embryos for human germ line editing (Liang et al 2015), the demand for human oocytes and embryos has once again increased
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