Vatican lists objectionable reproductive procedures

(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.