Catriona A. W. Mcmillan, The Human Embryo in vitro: Breaking the Legal Stalemate, Cambridge University Press, 2021, 225 pp, ￡85, Hardback, ISBN 978-1-108-84410-9.

摘要

In large part, thanks to the expansive recent Wellcome-funded project at Edinburgh Law School, 'Confronting the Liminal Spaces of Health Research Regulation',1 'limi-nality' as a concept is enjoying much attention in the world of academic medical law. In this exciting monograph, part of the extensive output of the aforementioned project, McMillan uses the concept as a lens to reconceive and reposition the discourse around the regulation of the human embryo. Wielding liminality as a double-bladed sword McMillan argues that both human embryos and the very legislation that governs them are in fact liminal and that the law must face up to these facts if it is going to 'adequately and justifiably meet the challenge that advances in technology bring' (p 207). The term 'liminality' was coined by anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep in 1909 to describe the concept of process and change in human experience as people move through distinct states of being. While Van Gennep was concerned with the anthropology of small-scale societies' rites of passage, the term has grown a life of its own outside of that since. 3McMillan explains 'It is often utilised to understand, and examine, those who occupy and often transgress delineated spaces; it is inherently concerned with better comprehension of the processual nature of becoming (emphasis in original) (p 3). On this understanding, especially with emphasis on the idea of 'becoming', it is clear why the lens of liminality might seem promising to a bioethical consideration of the embryo—a literal human being in process (or not) of becoming. McMillan takes a large portion in the middle of the monograph to unpack this more. The idea of embryos as liminal beings is not new, as McMillan acknowledges, but its application to the legal regulatory sphere is.