Preimplantation and prenatal genetic diagnostics in Russian Federation: ethical and legal issues

Abstract

The topicality of the article is due to the strategy of transition to personalized medicine in Russia, based, among other things, on technologies of preimplantation and prenatal genetic diagnostics. The purpose of the article is to analyze the main directions of ethical and legal support for the development of these technologies. The work is based on the study of relevant international regulations, foreign and Russian legislation using the methods of legal-dogmatic and philosophical-legal analysis. The article substantiates the need for a clearer distinction between legal and moral-religious approaches to regulating relations in applying these technologies. The task is to find legal structures that can take into account the moral aspects of the problem without replacing legal regulation with an appeal to moral and religious values and norms. An example of this approach is the development of a legal regime for manipulations with embryo in vitro, in which the necessary legal protection of the embryo is provided by recognizing its special ontological status as a constitutional value of the common good. From these positions, the author identifies a range of issues that should form the organizational and legal context necessary to ensure adequate guarantees of human rights in the field of application of the considered genetic technologies. The legal regulation of this range of issues should be fixed in a special federal law on genetic testing.

Keywords

• preimplantation genetic diagnostics
• prenatal genetic diagnostics
• ethical and legal problems
• legal regulation
• human embryo in vitro
• fetal rights
• medical insurance