THE VATICAN has issued a severe warning on the moral implications of "biotechnical" treatments such as genetic engineering, cloning, in vitro fertilisation, the morning-after pill and the freezing of human embryos.
In a complex document called Dignitas Personae(The Dignity of The Person), released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith but bearing the approval of Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican argues that many of the latest advances in the field of biotechnology raise serious moral problems for doctors and researchers.
The document says they have a duty to refuse to use biological material obtained by unethical means. It claims human cloning could lead to "biological slavery".
Furthermore, the process of in vitro fertilisation is again condemned not only because it usually involves the destruction of embryos - something which constitutes the "blithe acceptance of an enormous number of abortions" - but also because the in vitro technique separates procreation from the conjugal act.
Vatican commentators see this latest document as an updating of the 1987 instruction Donum Vitae(The Gift of Life) which issued an unequivocal rejection of in vitro fertilisation, human cloning, surrogate motherhood and non-therapeutic experiments with human embryos.
Dignitas Personaeconcludes that there is an "urgent need to mobilise consciences in favour of life". Arguing that human life "is always a good", the document concludes that "the human embryo has, from the very beginning, the dignity proper to a person". The document argues that it is "gravely illicit" to take stem cells from a living human embryo because this inevitably causes the death of the embryo.
Meanwhile, chair of the Irish Bishops' consultative group on bioethics Bishop Donal Murray said yesterday: "It worries me enormously that in the European Union, in the actions of our Government, and in the actions of institutions in Ireland, the driving force (where embryonic stem cell research is concerned) appears to be economic, economics, profit. Not ethical considerations about what kind of world we are creating or what kind of respect we are showing to other members of our race when we use them in order to produce treatments which have not yet appeared and may not appear as adult stem cells are as promising."