We will return to this case at the end of this article. Meanwhile we will provide a brief description of some common approaches to ethics. We intend this as a reference piece for readers of future issues. If you are already familiar with ethics, you may wish to skip over it. Morals refers to actions, ethics to the reasoning behind these actions.
Ethics is an examined and carefully considered structure that includes both practice and theory.
Unless they are based on general principles or on statements about parent-child relationships, statements like these are not ethical statements. An ethical statement would discuss benefits, harms, individuals' rights to choose, fairness, or needs of the child. Many ethical problems in genetics present more than two alternatives and are therefore not dilemmas, but trilemmas or quadrilemmas. These are not ethical statements because they do not include a rationale that transcends particular institutions. Technology will eventually solve this problem.