Some people would say 'look you are dealing with the beginnings of life, that you are dealing from the point of fertilisatoin onwards, with a new human individual'. I think most of us would want to talk about it as a human entity which has some potential. Some would go further and say, 'well that is a new human individual, a person'. How do you contend with the question of whether it is right or wrong to do research on human embryos?
Clearly, there was and there still is a very strong division of opinion between those people who think that any such research is totally out. Yes, on the one hand some would say 'from the beginning, from the point of conception there is a human embryo and it is not possible for you to experiment, even in a limited way, on that embryo'. On the one hand you have got people who say that, and I suspect that amongst thinking people this is a fairly big majority, you have a wide number of people who would actually say that the development of a human being is a gradual process and it is achieved by a series of stages in the womb. Even outside of the womb there are certainly recognisable stages from conception onwards and the degree of experimentation which is appropriate for those stages will differ from stage to stage. So there are guidelines which are laid down which suggest that research be permitted up to 14 days. That seemed to me to be a view that I think would be widely held within the Church of England. Ian Ramsey, a very influential person within the Church of England, in this matter would certainly have held that sort of view, and his successor John Hapgood in Durham equally was saying the same sort of thing. I was in the Diocese of Durham then, so I suppose under Ian Ramsey and then under John Habgood, I inherited something of their outlook. I suppose in all honesty that before that time, before I really had to, I didn't really think about this question very much at all. But when I had to, it seemed to me self evident that the development of human beings was a gradual process and the sort of pressure, if you call experimentation pressure, the sort of pressure that could be put on an embryo right at the beginning was different from the sort of pressure that could be put at 6 months or just before birth. There was a developing process, and that whole developing process needed some guidance to it. If you just let people do what they feel is right, they are bound to contravene in some way or another many peoples understanding of what the development of the human being is. But if there is some informed guidelines then I think most people will accept, give or take an article in a guideline here or there, that that is helpful and necessary.
So, is the intent of the research important?
Well I think it is most important. It depends upon what you are researching for - if you are talking about Nazi type research for example, just exploiting human material in order to achieve racial purity or something of that sort that would be ruled out almost universally. But if the intent is to broaden the base from which conception can take place, that is to say to help women to have babies, when perhaps there might be impediments to that happening in other respects - if the intent is to do that - it can only be conformity with Gods will because God in the first place created human beings to have children, to multiply and so on. Certain barriers have arisen in the course of time and if human beings can overcome some of those barriers then that must surely be good.