BARCELONA, March 1, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – 14 Spanish women are pregnant with embryos that they rescued from medical experiments from an in vitro fertilization unit in Barcelona. The head of the facility, Dr. Olga Serra, said that couples who had lost a child, infertile couples, and single and homosexual women were among those who came forward to adopt an embryo. About a third of the people coming forward for the programme are from outside Spain.
“There are also couples who already have children and for ethical reasons consider this a new kind of parenthood, to provide a solution for a leftover embryo and avoid its use in research,” Dr. Serra said.
Most of Spain’s 40 million inhabitants are at least nominally Catholic but the country’s fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, as is paradoxically true of most modern Catholic countries. It is not widely known even among Catholics that the Catholic Church is officially against the practice of in vitro fertilization. However, the problem of what to do with the un-numbered thousands, or possibly millions, of frozen embryonic persons in IVF facilities around the world, presents a moral quandary that the Church has yet to resolve.
Since the panic election of a leftist government after terrorist attacks in March of last year, the use of embryonic human beings in destructive medical research has been legalized. Scientists all over the world are clamouring for governments to make frozen IVF embryos available for stem cell research, however, thus far the broad success realized by stem cell therapies have been entirely from adult, not embryonic cells.