Human embryonic stem cell research - a marginal and yet unpleasant problem for Austrian (bio)politics

Research with embryonal stem cells (ESCs) is burdened by a socio-moral conflict, which implies equally the duty to protect human (embryonic) life and the duty to help sick people. In Austria, research with ESCs is not regulated by law. Because of their necessary destruction it is prohibited to use surplus ART-pre-embryos to generate ESCs. Contrary to this, the import of ESCs for research is allowed. Despite numerous regulatory requests of opponents and supporters of the ESCs-research these divergences were not subjected to any political agreement. The question is why politicians avoided to target this regulation. To clarify this attitude, I investigated statements on stem cell research of politicians that were submitted in the context of five outstanding events with the help of the Critical Discourse Analysis by the linguist Siegfried J & auml;ger. The result was that most politicians from AVP, FPA, BZA rejected this research and avoid discussions by framing, blocking or suppressing. Politicians from the SPA negated such discussions, differently from the Greens. An important reason for all parties was the concern that latent political issues such as abortion, ART (because of surplus pre-embryos), etc. may trigger an up-to-date. Therefore, most involved politicians preferred non-decision making to keep the unregulated status quo.