Edited by H Haker, D Beyleveld. Ashgate Publishing Co, 2000, £45.00 (hb), pp 335. ISBN 0 7546 1021 7

This is a challenging book that I recommend for anyone who wishes to engage with contemporary philosophical discussions relating to assisted reproduction, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and embryo research. It consists of six principal papers, each accompanied by responses from two discussants. There is also, in an appendix, a summary of the discussion that followed each of these six sessions in the final symposium of the EU-funded European Network for Biomedical Ethics held in Sheffield in 1999. In addition, there is a seventh paper in which the network, funded from 1996–1999, is evaluated, and there are introductory and closing remarks to the volume by Dietmar Mieth, Professor of Social Ethics at Tübingen.

In his introductory contribution, Professor Mieth asks us to consider the words that are used to describe the practices of IVF and PGD and the problems they generate. He follows Illich in problematising the word “life”, tracing its use over the past two centuries in the context of our mechanistic biology and our society’s possessive individualism. He argues that the terms of the “official” moral debates in this area—the terminology of bioethics as well as the terms of reference of the learned bodies and committees—have pre-empted these deliberations so that they can …