Rarely has any scientific development stirred more public controversies than recent researches that make use of human embryos to harvest stem cells or clone another person. Facing these issues, policy-makers worldwide have been seeking counsels from national bioethics commissions of all varieties. By “national bioethics commissions,” this paper refers to commissions set up to advise government policy-makers on bioethics-related public policy, such as U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics, National Ethics Council of Germany, and Human Genetic Commission of the United Kingdom. This article sees these national bioethics commissions as an opportunity to serve as an institution that can help realize the ideal condition for policy-making advocated in theories of deliberative democracy. Nevertheless, given the highly political nature of the issues, and national commissions’ vulnerability to be manipulated, there are also good reasons to be wary of its pitfalls. Hence, by drawing in experiences of bioethics commissions worldwide, particularly their recommendation for stem cell research, this article seeks to provide a critical examination of national commission’s ability to facilitate deliberative democracy and make concrete institutional suggestion as to how it can achieve it. With a size small enough to allow deliberative debate, yet pluralistic enough to reflect possible societal viewpoints, we argue that if properly structured, national bioethics commissions’ opinions can set a de facto burden of reasoning for public policy makers should they seek to decide otherwise. This in turn would create a pressure for sound moral reasoning in a policy area that tends to be infused with bio-politics and hence realize the ideal of deliberative democracy.

National Bioethics Commissions; Deliberative Democracy; Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research