Attitudes Toward Embryo Research, Worldviews, and the Moral Status of the Embryo Frame

Abstract

Embryo research for obtaining stem cells is an attitudinal object embedded in a complex space of high expectations for reaching desirable goals, and also of strong moral reservations about the utilization and production of human embryos for research ends. An explanatory model of public attitudes to embryo research is offered here, composed of general variables and worldviews (expectations about scientific-technological advances, reservations to science, trust in scientists, religiosity, gender) and highly specific ones (one evaluative, views on “the moral status of the embryo,” and the other of a cognitive nature, “biological literacy”). A key factor in accepting or rejecting this line of research is the current, de facto, competition between biological science and moral and religious creeds in shaping a frame or image of the moral status of the embryo, either as a pure biological entity or, alternatively, as an actual or potential human being entitled to special protection.