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<font size=4><b>Please join us for an STS Brown Bag Lunch Talk on Monday,
April 3rd, at 12:00 noon:<br>
</font><div align="center"><font size=5 color="#000080">The Politics of
Stem Cells in Sweden. <br>
Explaining Liberal Regulations in the Social Democratic State<br><br>
Teresa Kulawik<br><br>
</font><font size=4>MIT, E51-275 <br>
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Feel free to bring your lunch; coffee and
dessert will be provided</i>
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Teresa Kulawik is an Associate Professor in Political Science in the
Department of Gender Studies, and Research Leader at the Centre for
Baltic and East European Studies at the University College of South
Stockholm. She received her Dr.phil. in Political Science from the free
University of Berlin in 1997. Dr. Kulawik's areas of specialization
include Comparative Politics, Theory and Politics of the Welfare State,
History and Politics, Politics of Knowledge, Social Movements, and Gender
Politics. Her current research projects are genetic engineering,
democracy and deliberation to Germany, Poland and Sweden; Science,
politics and public in the Baltic Sea region. She has had research
appointments at several universities, including Columbia University's
Research Center on Women.<br><br>
<u>Abstract<br>
</u>The potential and risks of biotechnology and genetic engineering have
been the subject of public discussion for over two decades. By now,
several countries have devised policies that impose state regulations on
genetic and biomedical research and practices. What makes Sweden
especially relevant for this case study? At first, Sweden appears to have
quite a puzzling policy pattern indeed. As a social democratic regime
with an extensive statist governance system, Sweden stands out in its
biomedical policy through remarkably liberal, lenient regulations, which,
in European comparison, are closest to those of Great Britain. Sweden's
legislation allows for the use of so-called "spare" human
embryos, resulting from IVF procedures, for research purpose,
pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, and egg donation. This country also
has a considerable amount of embryonic stem cell lines at its disposal
and has recently initiated an entire research program involving their
use. Furthermore, the creation of – instead of the use of
"spare" – human embryos for research purposes and so-called
therapeutic cloning has been recently legalized.<br>
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This policy-making process provoked only a moderate deal of controversy.
Parliamentary resolutions concerning the issue were backed by a broad
consensus among all parties in Parliament. To say the least, the
politicization of biomedical issues has been quite limited. This
corresponds well to the virtual lack of noticeable mobilization of
extra-parliamentary groups. This may come as a surprise for at
least two reasons. Sweden generated one of the largest environmentalist
movements in the 1970s. From a comparative perspective, Sweden has been
classified as having high political potential regarding "new
politics." Hence, one would expect more pronounced articulation of
criticism concerning biomedical research and practice in the political
arena. In addition, over half of the Cabinet members in Sweden are women
and its Parliament boasts a 44% membership of women. Sweden is regarded
as an important example for the feminist hypothesis that a correlation
exists between the numeric presence of women in political institutions
and their substantial representation, which results in women friendly
policy outcomes. Therefore, it might be assumed that women involved in
policy-making would problematize the gendered implications of biomedical
techniques that turn women into suppliers of human "raw
materials". However, this is not the case: gendered consequences of
biomedical techniques have hardly even been mentioned in Swedish
political discourse.<br>
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I will de-riddle the puzzling features of Sweden's biopolitics through
presenting the juncture between institutionalist and discursive
approaches. In short, I argue that the Swedish model is based on a
productivist paradigm, the institutional and discursive parameters of
which have not been decisively extended through its "new
politics." In this way, elitist policy-making structures within
environmental and technology policies have remained intact. Ironically,
this relative openness, which enabled the rapid integration of new issues
and political actors, was what led to the blockage of extensive
participatory rights (as a counter-concept to the elitist policy style)
and hindered the development of oppositional public spaces and forms of
knowledge. Sweden's heritage of utilitarian ethics and pragmatic legal
tradition and its assertions make it even more difficult for leftist or
feminist to formulate a critical stance. Therefore, the only anti-embryo
research position taken in the political arena was by the Christian
Democratic Party. I will start by providing an overview of policy
regulations and then analyze the peculiar relation between the social
democratic state, and the so-called new politics. I will then examine the
institutions and actors in the biomedical policy field, and finally
reconstruct the lines of argumentation within policy discourse on embryo
research and stem cells.<br><br>
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