This chapter reflects on liminality, a guiding concept in the project that brought both authors to Edinburgh and has featured prominently in Graeme Laurie’s most recent work. It introduces the concept of liminality and discusses Laurie’s framing and use of the term before going on to illustrate how both the concept and Laurie’s approach to it have shaped and facilitated further research on the ethics and governance of reproduction. The chapter considers the wider implications of Laurie’s contributions to the field, drawing out some of the key themes of his work on liminality, namely the processual, the experiential and the ‘quality of in-between-ness’. It provides new perspectives by applying these themes to research on the ethics and regulation of surrogacy as well as artificial womb technology. The chapter argues for the relevance of liminality as an analytical framing device, to reveal important lessons for ethics and law beyond the realm of health research regulation. Finally, the opportunity is taken to reflect on Laurie’s guidance as a project leader and the ways in which the authors’ own liminal identities in the project laid the foundation for their future as researchers.

When the use of embryos in vitro for research was regulated under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 (as amended), regulators tried to navigate the various thresholds that occur in embryonic and research processes through providing clear-cut boundaries – the most well-known of these being the 14-day rule. This chapter offers an examination of this rule as a contemporary example of an existing mechanism in health research that is being pushed to its scientific limits.  This steadfast legal boundary, faced by a relatively novel challenge, requires reflection on appropriate regulatory responses to embryo research, including the revisitation of ethical concerns, and an examination of the acceptability of carrying out research on embryos for longer than 14 days ? I argue that recognising the inherent link between processes and the regulation of the margins of human life, enables us to ask us to ask more nuanced questions about what we want for future frameworks, for example, ‘when is human?’, one that legal discussion often shies away from. Instead I will argue that viewing regulation of embryo research as instance of both processual regulation and regulating for process has the potential to disrupt existing regulatory paradigms in embryo research, and enable us to think about how we can, or perhaps whether we should, implement lasting frameworks in this field.

This chapter considers how a liminal lens help inform contemporary discussions surrounding embryos in vitro and beyond using three case studies: 1) the 14-day rule, 2) in vitro gametogenesis, and 3) ectogenesis. The first case study is important as it is the principal manifestation of law’s attempt to reflect ‘special status’ on the embryo, and because it is also an example of legal attempts to deal with embryonic processes. This example is used to examine what the context-based approach developed in this book could bring to contemporary debate about the nature of such a rule, as well as its retention, reduction, or extinction. The second example enables us to consider what the analysis offered in this book says about these relatively new technologies in relation to their regulation, and the key biological and legal thresholds involved. The final case study focuses specifically on partial ectogenesis, a technology which not only introduces new thresholds, but leads us to question our existing understanding of meaningful legal thresholds, most notably birth as the moment in which the foetus/baby attains personhood. By these means, the analysis engages with the entire trajectory of embryonic development as this is driven by scientific possibilities, both current and near future.

This chapter draws parallels to the gothic trope that surrounded discussions on embryos in vitro in the 1980s as a frame of analysis that has grown in counter-response to law’s tendency to place entities either within the category of a ‘liberal, individual self,’ or outwith it (rarely in between). To explain, the gothic self is characterised by disorder, chaos, and dependency. It cannot be subsumed under the traditional ‘self’ that the law presupposes of its subjects. Further, within ‘the gothic’ lies the key concept of ‘monstrosity’, at the margins of what we deem to be human: ‘we stake out the boundaries of our humanity by delineating the boundaries of the monstrous’. While the gothic trope does not explicitly centre around ‘the in between,’ it is argued that we should see gothic entities as such, because of their common placement - legally, and sometimes socially - on the boundary between liberal, individualised human, and something akin to a science-fiction-esque ‘monster.’ The controversy that causes rhetorical parallels between new research and monstrous beings and mad scientists to be drawn is a major contributor to policy-makers reluctance to revisit the legal status of embryos in vitro.

In this introduction, McMillan introduces key concepts and definition discussed throughout the book, including: liminality, ‘the embryo’, process, and ‘legal status’. The regulation of emerging technologies may be described as the governance of processes in persistent flux, and in some cases, it is the regulation of what we do not yet know or fully understand. Reconciling process with progress, therefore, has not been easy. Nonetheless, the regulation of the embryo in vitro, and all the practices that law currently allows are, in essence, regulating for processes of change. Considering that it has been over 30 years since the 1990 Act was passed in its original form, is it time to legally reconceive ‘the embryo’? In this book McMillan calls for, and considers, the basis for a more coherent and robust intellectual defence of the ways in which we justify the different manners in which law treats different types of embryos created purposively towards different ends. The main questions that this analysis seeks to answer are the following: Overall, does law reflect and embody processual regulation, if so, what does this look like? And if not, what form could it take if reform were thought to be desirable?