VATICAN, August 18, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Continuing its series on human cloning in preparation for the upcoming United Nations consideration of the matter, the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano newspaper published an article on August 9 by Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo. Cardinal Trujillo, who heads the Pontifical Council for the Family, wrote that “One way to place ourselves before this question would be to put ourselves in the position, not of the scientists who perform the cloning, but of the embryo (which we also were at one stage).” The cardinal also repeated the Church’s position that therapeutic cloning is “even worse” than reproductive cloning since at least reproductive clones are created to live until natural death whereas with therapeutic cloning humans are created to harvest their parts after which they are destroyed.
Writing on the perspective of a human embryo, the Cardinal says. “Surely it would not be pleasant to enter the world in a laboratory, instead of being the fruit of the union of our parents. Neither would it be pleasurable to be the survivor among tens or even hundreds of our twin siblings eliminated as ‘defective.’ Still less would it be pleasant to be manipulated for producing ‘pieces’ that someone else needs (for example, the kidneys), then to die after a brief and anguished life which had been ‘produced’ precisely for this reason.” (with files from John Allen’s Word from Rome https://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/ )