Barriers are falling throughout the Anglosphere. Old legal and moral taboos are being discarded, and a new order is rising to supreme power and prestige.
As America is preparing to elect a president who will have supported abortion rights to an unprecedented extent, as Canada comes to terms with the state having appointed arch-abortionist Henry Morgentaler to the Order of Canada, as Australia is coming to terms with yet more liberalization of its abortion laws, the United Kingdom may be making the most consequential steps of all, on a wide variety of bio-science fronts including getting rid of the barrier of consent in using human tissue from a greater range of human beings than have ever been considered fair game for no-consent medical exploitation in the Anglosphere. (link)
From the Telegraph story linked above: Human tissue could be taken from the mentally infirm without their consent and used to create embryos for experimentation, under Government proposals added to a controversial bill.
On Wednesday MPs will vote on a bill which would allow the creation of human/animal hybrid embryos to be used for stem cell research, change the conditions for granting IVF, and possibly liberalise the abortion laws.
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It can now be revealed that a Government amendment, agreed after the main parliamentary debates, would allow tissue to be used from people who lack the "mental capacity" to give consent, children whose parents give permission, and anyone who has previously donated samples to hospitals for medical research but can no longer be traced.
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"Under the amendment, if a person was deemed unable to give consent their carer would make a decision on their behalf. If the person did not have a carer, researchers would nominate a person to make the judgement. If scientists wanted to use human tissues already donated for research, perhaps during a medical procedure, but were unable to trace the donors because the research had been anonymised or the person had moved house, the samples could also be used."
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Catherine Elliot, from the Medical Research Council, said such research could provide a "powerful tool" to examine the development and treatment of different diseases. She said research would "rarely" be carried out without consent, because under the amendment, ethics committees must be satisfied the same research could not have been carried out using tissue from patients who had granted permission.
In general, when human beings figure out a way to benefit by doing debatable things to other human beings who can't fight back, whether it's the direct profit of chattel slavery or the benefits of enjoying a freer sex life without having one's career interrupted by childbirth, they go ahead and do it, and revise morality and law as much as is needed to bless profitable practices with acceptability.
If there's anything the progress of the judge-driven legalization of gay marriage should have taught us, it's that slippery slopes are real. When powerful elites in society are determined to have something all the way, as far as they want, and they press for it constantly and often secretively, without regard for past assurances or expectations of moderation (as in this case, where public assurances that consent was fundamental were set aside behind closed doors), then the changes to law and morality that take place can be so radical that anyone forecasting early in the process what would come later would have been mocked; and compromise positions are in reality compromised positions - untenable and swiftly swept away, like the domestic partnership laws that courts are making into mandates for the gay marriage laws that they were supposed to be instead of.
Safeguards in medical decision-making are sufficiently widely honored in the breach that when the case for further liberalization of, e.g. the laws on assisted suicide is pressed, this is a typical argument: doctors are making these decisions, and acting on them, all the time anyway, and it would be better and less hypocritical for the law to accept it. So there is not much reason to think that guardians of the rights of potential involuntary donors appointed by researchers are not going to give researchers what they want.
Clearly, medical researchers now see profit in getting hold of every bit of tissue that might be valuable to them, and alterations to law and morality to let them get at the goodies whenever they really want to - consent or no consent - are now far advanced behind the scenes. There is no reason to think that pressure to alter law and morality in this direction will end with this legislation in the United Kingdom, whether it passes now or is held up, or that similar proposals will not make their way to whichever country you live in.
This seems like a new Kelo: a warrant for the powerful to take from the powerless what they have, as long as there is some plan, with no binding requirement that the plan be carried out or its benefits be real. Only in this new case the property taken is human tissue, not real estate.
There was a substantial political and legal reaction to Kelo, though it's doubtful if the reaction has been enough to remedy the damage to property rights it did.
What should the political and legal reaction be to proposals to remove consent requirements when researchers want to take human tissue?
Given that compromise solutions often prove to be untenable and slippery slope accelerators for elites who want law and morality altered, and given that medical research is a worthwhile cause (which it certainly is) what worthwhile and acceptable reactions can there be?
Or, is it better to depoliticize such alterations in the balance of property rights, and entrust the alteration of these rights, as far as possible, to back-room committees and institutions such as the courts, that don't have to fear much interference from naysayers and neo-luddites?
Update: the bill passed overwhelmingly, 355 to 129 (link)