Vatican criticizes leaps in biotechnology
Document doesn’t equate embryo, person
CHICAGO – Applying its abiding ethic of life to modern medicine, the Vatican on Friday condemned genetic engineering and other innovations in biotechnology that have evolved in recent decades since the introduction of in-vitro fertilization.
In a document on bioethics titled “Dignitas Personae,” or “Dignity of a Person,” the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith offers the most concrete guidance to date on how to honor the dignity of human life and value of procreation in the 21st century.
The instructions, released Friday, build upon a similar document issued by the congregation in 1987 titled “Donum Vitae,” or “Gift of Life,” which at the time addressed advances in artificial reproductive technologies and denounced in-vitro fertilization.
Since then, the fields of embryology and genetic engineering have advanced exponentially, including the introduction of embryonic stem cell research in 1998 and the mapping of the human genome, which identified the more than 20,000 genes in human DNA, between 1990 and 2003.
Moral questions associated with those innovations have also become the domain of courts and legislators.
Some Catholic theologians were surprised that the document did not prohibit hospitals from using the kind of emergency contraception that halts fertilization in cases of rape. And though the document denounced researchers who create embryos and use them as biological material to produce vaccines, it allowed parents to use those vaccines to protect their child’s health, as long as they express their moral objection to their physician.
The document also stopped short of defining an embryo as a person, saying instead that the embryo has “from the very beginning, the dignity proper to a person.”
The document also refrained from endorsing – some even say it discouraged – activists’ efforts to implant in their own wombs embryos discarded after in-vitro fertilization. Yet the document also likened the destruction of those embryos to abortion.
In fact, it broadened the definition of abortion by classifying the “morning-after pill” and the drug RU-486, which blocks the action of hormones needed to keep a fertilized egg implanted in the uterus, “within the sin of abortion.” It also denounced forms of artificial fertilization because it substitutes for sexual intercourse.