SUMMARY

The increasing possibilities of taking control over the characteristics of descendants that the advances occurred in the last years in the fields of Biology, Biochemistry, Genetics and Medicine have brought about, introduce new ethical and legal matters that are subject to opposed valuations.

Underlying these controversies is to be found the different consideration that is taken regarding the diverse interests at stake: in pluralist societies, like this one of us, there is no unique way of understanding and valuating, for instance, the reproductive freedom, the women’s status, the rights of ill or disabled people or the freedom of scientific research. Either human life, in its prenatal phase of development, is subject to a uniform assessment.

These different opinions find their own reflex on a legislative level. This article is, therefore, partly devoted to taking a closer look at some of the general features of the regulation of the new reproductive techniques in the Spanish legislation, as well as in those from other countries that seem to be inspired by different regulative models. This analysis, despite its mandatory briefness, is expected to show that beyond these regulations divergent conceptions about the value of human life in its initial stages are found too. It seems that the Spanish Law ponders on the idea that the protection of human life must be gradually intensified as long as it goes on getting some modifications, but this idea must compete against the one whose starting point is the biological continuity of the human being from the time of conception and comes up to the conclusion that it is impossible to draw up any type of distinction that is not completely arbitrary in that continuum. Therefore, the involvements of both points of view in several features of the prenatal life’s protection must be thought of, in order to consider its consistency through social and legal practices unargued in principle or, at least, widely shared; and also in order to establish whether the distinctions that seem to raise from such practices could be translated into consistent theoretical and regulative schemas. To this effect, above all the role being granted in those contexts to the fact of birth and that of the embryo’s implantation in the maternal uterus, and its possible meaning within a gradualist model of the human life and dignity protection, will be examined. At last, some conclusions regarding the most adequate focus to face the challenges that the new assisted reproductive techniques bring about, will be drawn.