Vatican condemns frozen embryo birth

Press, 21 April 1984, Page 16

Vatican condemns frozen embryo birth

NZPA-AP Vatican City The Vatican newspaper has condemned the process used in the conception of the world’s first baby from a frozen embryo announced in Melbourne, Australia. “One understands the desire of sterile couples to have children but one must realise that not everything one desires can be right,” said “L’Osservatore Romano” in an editorial by a theologian, the Rev. Gino Concetti. He said that the new technique was unacceptable because it required the act of masturbation to obtain sperm and it destroyed other embryos that were capable of producing a human being. The Roman Catholic Church considers masturbation “a deviation” and a grave sin and has condemned artificial insemina-

tion. Pope John Paul 11, in an important pronouncement on genetic experimentation in 1982, condemned “in the most explicit and formal way” manipulations of the human embryo, saying that the human being, from conception to death, “cannot be exploited for any purpose whatsoever.” On April 10, Australian scientists announced the birth of a healthy baby girl two weeks after she had been delivered by caesarean section by the in-vitro fertilisation team at Monash University in Melbourne. Father Concetti said in the article that the only techniques morally acceptable to the Church were those that “facilitate the natural act that involves the total co-operation and union of the partners.” He did not elaborate.

He said that scientific techniques that separated the physical from the moral act of conception had “consequences that cannot be disregarded.” Could the sole goal of procreation “justify an act — masturbation — held by Catholic morality to be nevertheless illicit?” he said. He also criticised the fact that not all the embryos used for such experiments are implanted and lead to births. “Science teaches ... that from the moment of fusion of two cells, ‘a being of the human species’ is initiated,” he said. “The destruction of these eggs ... raises serious and profound interrogations of a moral nature.”