The legal status of the human embryo in Brazilian law [Statutul legal al embrionului uman în dreptul brazilian]
The legal status of the human embryo in Brazilian law

Summary/Abstract: Brazilian law expressly recognizes the existence of the human beings, the unborn child, and the conceptus, not having concerned itself with the extrauterine embryo. At the same time, reports on the genetic editing of embryos are growing and more recently, in mid-2020, the National Technical Commission on Biosafety authorized gene therapy in Brazil. Before 2022 reached its end, a Resolution edited by the Federal Council of Medicine seems to suggest, resorting to eloquent silence, the prohibition of discarding surplus embryos. In these intersections the article found its hypothesis. The main objective is to investigate the legal status of the embryo through the analysis of the normative protection abstractly conferred on it in Brazil. The review of the literature and the current legislation guided the mapping of the data collected for reflections that found in the jus-sociological imagination the amalgam necessary for its formatting. In the end, it was concluded that the embryo, outside the womb, is not a person.

• Details
• Contents