(December 12, 2008) The Vatican on Friday spelled out the Catholic Church’s moral
teaching on a wide variety of scientific and medical procedures dealing with human
life and reproduction. Catholic teaching on bioethics is based on the principle of
unconditional respect for human life from conception to natural death and for the
transmission of such life through sexual intercourse by married couples only. The
document, entitled “Dignitas Personae”, or ‘the dignity of the person’ in Latin, was
released at a press conference on the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness
of the Unborn. Issued by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
the document is a sequel to its 1987 document titled “Donum Vitae,” or “the Gift of
Life.” The Vatican’s latest document condemned virtually all forms of artificial
fertilisation and genetic engineering and urged Catholics to oppose them in almost
all cases. Among the several procedures and practices that the Vatican described
as morally unacceptable are: research in and use of embryonic stem cells; post-fertilisation
birth control methods such as morning after pills…; surrogate motherhood; reproductive
and therapeutic human cloning and hybrid cloning using animal oocytes. However,
the Vatican document also declared several procedures as morally acceptable – among
them: promotion of natural fertility including hormone treatment and surgery for
endometriosis or obstructed fallopian tubes; use of stem cells obtained from adult
organisms, umbilical cord blood or fetuses dead by natural causes; research into
the prevention of sterility, and somatic gene cell therapy for strictly therapeutic
purposes in an individual patient.