Vatican on IVF
A senior Vatican official yesterday said there was no moral justification for discriminating between embryos used in in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedures, setting the tone for a Vatican conference on the ethical treatment of embryos before they are implanted.
Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, who heads the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Life, said the theory that an embryo created in a laboratory was merely a “pre-embryo" – and thus not worthy of legal protection and the right to life as an already implanted embryo – was morally wrong: “We must make it very clear that the discrimination between implanted embryos and embryos prior to implantation is a theory without any grounds, without any justification," Sgreccia said.
Sgreccia has said the Vatican is hosting the conference to review whether current scientific data supports the Vatican's hard-line position on in-vitro fertilisation and its belief that life begins at conception and deserves full legal protection from then on.
Pope Benedict XVI said that embryos created for in-vitro fertilisation deserve the same right to life as newborns and adults – a right that extends even to embryos that have not yet been transferred into a woman's womb. He made the comments to members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which is hosting an international Vatican conference on the ethics surrounding the issue. The Vatican opposes in-vitro procedures because embryos created in a laboratory are often discarded, whereas others are frozen and still others are created solely for the sake of experimentation or to create stem cells.
The Pope repeated the Church's position that life begins at the moment of conception and deserves to be respected and protected – a position set out most authoritatively in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae. That encyclical, however, did not specifically treat the question of the status of an embryo before it is implanted – the two or three days of growth in a laboratory during which the fertilized egg is dividing into a group of cells that are transferred by a doctor into the mother's uterine cavity.
Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, who heads the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Life, said the theory that an embryo created in a laboratory was merely a “pre-embryo" – and thus not worthy of legal protection and the right to life as an already implanted embryo – was morally wrong: “We must make it very clear that the discrimination between implanted embryos and embryos prior to implantation is a theory without any grounds, without any justification," Sgreccia said.
Sgreccia has said the Vatican is hosting the conference to review whether current scientific data supports the Vatican's hard-line position on in-vitro fertilisation and its belief that life begins at conception and deserves full legal protection from then on.
Pope Benedict XVI said that embryos created for in-vitro fertilisation deserve the same right to life as newborns and adults – a right that extends even to embryos that have not yet been transferred into a woman's womb. He made the comments to members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which is hosting an international Vatican conference on the ethics surrounding the issue. The Vatican opposes in-vitro procedures because embryos created in a laboratory are often discarded, whereas others are frozen and still others are created solely for the sake of experimentation or to create stem cells.
The Pope repeated the Church's position that life begins at the moment of conception and deserves to be respected and protected – a position set out most authoritatively in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae. That encyclical, however, did not specifically treat the question of the status of an embryo before it is implanted – the two or three days of growth in a laboratory during which the fertilized egg is dividing into a group of cells that are transferred by a doctor into the mother's uterine cavity.
posted by Volatto at 12:56 AM
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