[Is preimplantation diagnosis legal?--on the need for harmonizing legislation]

Whether PGD is already legally permitted in Germany today is a moot point. A guidelines draft of the Germany's Federal General Medical Council, the Bundesärztekammer, on pre-implantation genetic diagnostics that--like the earlier findings of the ethics commission of the German federal state of the Rhineland-Palatinate--assumed that the method is admissible, if certain clearly-defined indications are present and a rigorous testing procedure has been established, has given the discussion a new impetus. The discussion is in full swing, with calls by politicians for the legislator to pass a regulation mounting. Of late, though, constitutional objections have been raised against a positive-law regulation. Such a simple legal move to regulate PGD, it is claimed, would violate the constitutionally-guaranteed right to inviolable human dignity. Critics, however, point out that such an absolute inviolability does not exist. According to them, not only the verdicts by the German Federal Constitutional Court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, on the reform of section 218 of the German Federal Penal Code (StGB)--the paragraph that specifies the conditions under which an abortion is not punished--that relativize (in terms of the indication model) one claim to existence with respect to another, but also the approval in terms of pharmaceutical and medicine-products law of nidation-blocking agents, serve to show this. If the condition of being a human being were made to coincide with the completion of the genetic code upon the completion of the process of fertilisation, then one tended to forget, the critics noted, that this attendant dignity was not properly "infused with life" unless nidation had been successful. Without nidation everything were fragmentary, the total protection of human dignity according to Article 1 Section 1 of the Federal Republic's Basic Law, Germany's constitution, notwithstanding. During every in vitro fertilisation embryo transfer is conditional upon a variety of factors the presence of which is not noted until after fertilisation has taken place. On the part of the embryos, too, certain conditions have to be met whose presence at the moment of fertilisation is not assured. Thus an embryo with, for instance, defects that can be visually detected will not be transferred. With regard to these facts too the opponents of pre-implantation genetic diagnostics must be challenged to answer the question of why an embryo with visually-detectable defects should undoubtedly be allowed to be discarded, but the act of searching for "internal" defects be banned. Thus the fact remains that the mere acceptance of the loss of created embryos does not make artificial insemination a punishable offense, as long as the motive for the act is to bring about pregnancy. To achieve legal security for the couples and the physicians involved the law on the protection of embryos should be changed. The new regulations should determine under which conditions PGD is permissible. As is already the case for other norms that apply to reproductive medicine, but also for the practice of abortion, these regulations should contain an analogous right of refusal for the professionals involved. The laws relating to the healing professions, to the professional chambers, as well as the regulations of the various German federal states (which together constitute the Federal Republic of Germany) that apply to the professions should be amended accordingly.