WORLD-WIDE PLEAS TO BAN CLONING

VATICAN, Jan 12 (LSN) -Bishop Elio Sgreccia, director of the bioethics center at Rome’s Sacred Heart University, and vice-president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, has issued an urgent call for the enactment of clear laws banning the cloning of human beings. The bishop denounced the procedure as an ethical aberration on Vatican Radio, on the Tele-Pace television network, and finally in the Italian daily Avvenire.  Last week, President Clinton called scentist Richard Seed’s proposal to clone humans “profoundly troubling” and urged Congress to enact a law to restrict the procedure. Today, French President Jacques Chirac also called for a world ban on human cloning, and hours later 19 European nations signed an agreement Monday to prohibit genetic replication of humans. The members of the Council of Europe signed a protocol that would commit their countries to prohibiting by law “any intervention seeking to create human beings genetically identical to another human being, whether living or dead.”  Notably, Britain refused to sign the agreement “defending” the freedom of scientific research.  Germany noted that its own law banning all research on human embryos was much stronger and better legislation.  Countries which signed today were: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece,  Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Moldova, Norway, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Slovenia,  Spain, Sweden, Macedonia and Turkey.