BALTIMORE, May 24, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In language that exactly echoed that used by White House spokesman Trent Duffy, Baltimore’s Catholic Archbishop has condemned the proposed legislation that would allow embryos stored in IVF labs to be used for research that would end their lives.
William Cardinal Keeler wrote in the online edition of USA Today, that using living human beings at the embryonic stage of life “crosses a fundamental moral line.”“Government,” writes Keeler, “has no business forcing taxpayers to subsidize the destruction of innocent human life.” Keeler is the chairman of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Pro-Life Activities.
Keeler’s article, coming on the day of the vote in the House of Representatives, is a reiteration both of Catholic teaching that killing the human embryo is the moral equivalent of murder and the findings of international committees dating back to the Nuremberg Code forbidding experimentation on living human test subjects without consent.
Keeler writes, “This bill would lead to much killing that would not otherwise happen. And since all the ‘spare’ embryos available for research cannot provide enough stem cells to treat any major disease, the proposed law would inevitably lead to creating human lives in the laboratory solely to destroy them.”
He says that the promise of cures for diseases has been “exaggerated.” He quotes an article appearing in last week’s edition of the Journal, Science, “by Stanford University experts that ‘it is nearly certain that the clinical benefits of the research are years or maybe decades away.’”
The Cardinal listed juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, sickle-cell anemia and cardiac damage among those diseases that are currently being successfully treated with adult or umbilical cord stem cells.
He writes, “The fixation on destroying embryos has diverted resources away from more promising therapies, and therefore ill serves suffering patients as well as embryonic human beings. Congress should reject this bill and support promising medical research that all Americans can live with.”
With files from Yahoo News.