ROME, September 21, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The International Theological Commission, a Pontifical theological research body based in the Vatican, has offered a document that warns against the threat of the new reproductive technologies to the genetic integrity of the human species.
The document, titled, “Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God,” rules out human cloning, destruction of embryos, genetic enhancement, abortion or euthanasia. It warns that the modern ability of man to alter himself at the genetic level threatens to destroy the biological integrity of humanity. The question posed by the document was, “How far is man allowed to remake himself?” Among its conclusions was that genetic engineering aimed at producing a “superhuman” is radically immoral. One of the objections made during the debates on Canada’s reproductive technologies Bill C-6 (C-13) was that the continuation of IVF and other fertility treatments would threaten the genetic integrity of the population. This criticism was largely dismissed as alarmism by the bill’s supporters in the Liberal Party and the Senate. In a document that was sent to all the members of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, Campaign Life Coalition warned, “The genetic safety of the human species is denied by later clauses in the bill which allow the random manipulation of the genetic make-up of certain individual human persons through processes such as recombinant gene transfer and eugenic selection of embryos. The unrestricted use of donated sperm also creates a danger to the public safety by allowing large numbers of children to be manufactured from genetic material of the same father.”
The Theological Commission’s document echoes this warning. “The uniqueness of each human person, in part constituted by his biogenetic characteristics and developed through nurture and growth, belongs intrinsically to him and cannot be instrumentalized in order to improve some of these characteristics,” it said. The representatives of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) to the Senate Committee declined to mention this threat. They told the mostly Catholic Senators that they had no position on a bill that condoned and normalized practices which have been unequivocally condemned by the Catholic Church.
No clarification of the CCCB position has been forthcoming since the bill was passed in the spring. However, Jennifer Leddy, the Co-director of the CCCB’s Catholic Organization for Life and Family, gave a lecture after the passage of the bill at the University of Toronto where she praised the bill, and the Catholic endorsement of it, as a step forward. Catholic News Service coverage: https://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0405139.htm
Hansard of the presentation of the CCCB to the Canadian Senate February 26, 2004 https://www.parl.gc.ca/37/3/parlbus/commbus/senate/Com-e/soci-e/40653-e.htm?Language=E&Parl=37&Ses=3&comm_id=47
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