Editor’s note. The following is excerpted from the blog of John Smeaton, executive director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC).

The Anscombe Bioethics Centre held an impressive day conference this [last] week at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, entitled Human embryo research: law, ethics and public policy.

Anthony McCarthy, SPUC’s education and publications manager, Joe Lee, SPUC Scotland’s development officer, and I joined an international gathering of delegates to hear leading academics from Ireland, Italy, Germany, the US, France and Britain explain the status of the human embryo in their countries’ laws and public policies.

All the addresses given deserve future re-reading and study and I look forward to their promised publication in due course.

Dr David Albert Jones, the director of the Anscombe Centre, gave a fascinating insight into why Britain has one of the least restrictive policies on human embryo research in the world: “Not only”, Dr Jones said, “does UK law permit every conceivable category of embryo to be created for research, but it also shows little evidence of willingness to restrict human embryo research in practice. By 2008, 2 million embryos had been destroyed in clincal practice or research in the UK. In the same period the regulator (the HFEA) had only once refused a research license, and this was later granted on appeal.”

Commenting on Dame Mary Warnock’s report* on the basis of which the British Parliament voted in 1990 to legalise destructive research on human embryos for a wide range of purposes, Dr Jones said:

“Warnock’s approach is highly problematic. It is disingenuous to call this an account of the status of the embryo. The embryo drops out of consideration and it is the moral feelings of objectors that are considered. But it fails also as an attempt to respect these feelings, for it does not critically engage with the arguments but treats concern about harm to the embryo as a mere expression of emotion, in contrast to the concern about benefit to patients which is treated as an objective concern.”

I strongly recommend everyone to read the summary of Dr Jones’s address or to read it in full when the proceedings of the day conference are published. (Two years ago, I wrote on one aspect of the theme Dr Jones explored with such expertise this week in a post entitled Reasonable-minded citizens should be genuinely frightened of Mary Warnock.)