160 R.P. Fitzgerald and M. Legge
choice to users. One worker said: ‘I err on the side of giving people
CHOICE—yes choice—and they have access to counselling where the
counsellor will presumably point out all the pros and cons, then at the
end of the day they have made an informed choice and ...who am I...
who am I to judge what somebody else wants...’
This focus on choice for users emerges in the other studies of repro-
ductive scientists and medical professionals (Zeiler 2007 ; Ehrich et al.
2007 ; Williams et al. 2007 ; Franklin and Roberts 2006 ), although
interestingly (as Zeiler 2007 notes) it does not appear as an important
or desired aspect of the experience of using reproductive services for
actual or potential clients. This is an intriguing suggestion, as it high-
lights the manner in which ideologies of care and choice might be
promulgated through society—through the professional codes of work-
ers within powerful institutions such as state-provided health care. Most
of the scientists in our own study provided ample evidence of needing
to engage in self-development work in order to provide a legal service
of IVF while also holding various internal concerns about the uses to
which their technical skills were put. It should be noted that these con-
cerns varied between individuals, from minor qualms to more serious
concerns. The important note though is that there were concerns and
that the scientists each worked to silence these. Such concerns have been
noted in the UK study by Ehrich et al. ( 2007 ), in which the views of
clinic workers were analysed with regard to their ethical concerns about
the practice of PGD. Our own position is slightly different to Ehrich
et al. ( 2007 ) who argue that PGD provides specific original ethical con-
cerns for scientists that IVF did not. In our view, like the consultant
mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the practice of all reproduc-
tive medicine creates this need to subjugate individual moral concerns
to provide a legal service of health care. This is the vocational aspect of
the work.
In conclusion, our chapter illustrates the context-laden quality of
ethical dilemmas in HART in which the competencies of highly skilled
scientists are part of a social network from which choice is created
for clients of the service (whether the clients wish for it or not). The
labour to provide this choice sometimes involves strenuous work on
the self for individual scientists, and flags issues of concern around the
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