Prisoners of progress or hostages to fortune?

The new reproductive technologies, especially in vitro fertilization (IVF), have extended the possibilities of assisted reproduction to the benefit of the childless couples. At the same time these technologies and their added techniques, however, have fragmented reproduction and exposed the human egg to intervention yet unknown.... These possibilities have legal as well as ethical implications. The challenge is to obtain all the advantages of the reproduction revolution and avoid the disadvantages: to avoid becoming prisoners of progress, but to control the development and guide it in the directions we want. One of the problems is trying to foresee unwarranted consequences. Another is to agree upon which consequences are unwarranted and how they are best avoided or minimized. Although the questions that arise with respect to law, medicine and bioethics are similar all over the world, there are differences of a philosophical, economic, social, political, religious and even geographical nature which are not easily bridged. It is apparent, though, that core approaches are desirable. This article is an attempt to explore the ways in which these determinants have been manipulated in two European [Great Britain, Denmark] legal systems. We are interested in the ways in which those legal systems have been customized to provide temporary answers and marshalling points for regulating reproduction and we seek to make some observations on the ways in which laws, customs and values have been manipulated to produce pictures of the family and the way in which we want -- literally and figuratively -- to conceive of it in the 21st century.