Abstract
Following demands to regulate biomedicine in the post-war period, Sweden saw several political debates about research ethics in the 1970s. Many of the debates centered on fetal research and animal experiments. At stake were questions of moral permissibility, public transparency, and scientific freedom. However, these debates did not only reveal ethical disagreement—they also contributed to constructing new boundaries between life-forms. Taking a post-Marxist approach to discursive policy analysis, we argue that the meaning of both the “human” and the “animal” in these debates was shaped by a need to manage a legitimacy crisis for medical science. By analyzing Swedish government bills, motions, parliamentary debates, and committee memorials from the 1970s, we map out how fetal and animal research were constituted as policy problems. We place particular emphasis on the problematization of fetal and animal vulnerability. By comparing the debates, we trace out how a particular vision of the ideal life defined the human-animal distinction.
Highlights
Recent decades have seen a growing interest in the emergence of modern medical ethics, including the various state policies introduced to regulate scientific research
Hobson-West and Davies (2018) have studied how public attitudes toward laboratory animal suffering shape how researchers perceive the ethical problem of animal research
One way to drill to the core of this nexus, we suggest, is to operationalize it as a set of interlocking problem representations conditioned by their position in the discursive totality
Summary
Recent decades have seen a growing interest in the emergence of modern medical ethics, including the various state policies introduced to regulate scientific research. Taking a cognate approach, Druglitrø (2018) has argued that the perception of animal experimentation as a “good science” depends on certain “ethical choreographies” that draw the line between problematic and non-problematic animal treatment. These studies indicate that participants in research ethics debates do not deal with objectively given concerns—they produce the “problems” their actions and policies claim to solve. Our study traces how animal and fetal experiments were represented as particular types of problems in political debates over ethical regulation in Sweden in the 1970s
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