Constructing embryos, constructing politics: Connecting politics and technology in the Netherlands and Germany

Abstract

This article presents an innovative approach to interpreting and mending political discussions on sensitive medical-ethical issues. It adopts the idiom of co-production, which presumes that technological and political choices shape our world simultaneously, and in turn cannot be seen apart from the background that they themselves help shape. By developing the idea of a nexus, this connection between technological and political practices is further conceptualized. Through an analysis of debates on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), this article describes the constitution of the embryo in two countries. In Germany, the embryo is seen as a full member of the human community. In contrast, in the Netherlands the embryo is largely invisible. This difference connects to radically divergent moral decisions, technological configurations and political arrangements. In turn, these different configurations reproduce particular constitutions of the embryo. The article concludes that discussions about PGD gain transparency by breaking down the relations between political and technological practices into various levels. Each of these levels offers its own way to see the embryo as a nexus between practices of politics and practices of science and technology.