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News, weekly update, 4 to 10 October
A senior cardinal has said that family life is under attack by "direct
denial, if not mockery, ridicule, and scorn." Cardinal Jorge Mejia,
former archivist and librarian of the Catholic Church, identified same
sex unions, sex change operations, in vitro fertilization, as well as
the dehumanization of the human embryo, as the main reasons for attacks on the family. [Catholic News Agency, 9 October]
Archbishop Raymond Burke, of St Louis, USA, has said he was
"deeply concerned for all involved in the evils of human cloning and
the destruction of the human embryo to harvest its stem cells. The
woman who subjects herself to the harvesting of her eggs for human
cloning participates in a grave moral evil, the artificial generation
of human life," he said. [St Louis Review, 6 October]
Archbishop Sam Celestina Migliore, the
Catholic Church's representative to the United Nations, has addressed the UN
General Assembly telling it that it should not consider "access to reproductive
health" as a tool to promote abortions.
He reminded the General Assembly that UN documents have "sought
to balance strongly held views" and that it is imperative to "ensure that
respect for this delicate balance be maintained." [LifeNews.com 4 October]
Three teams of scientists in London, Edinburgh and Newcastle are to
submit simultaneous applications to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Authority (HFEA) this month, requesting licences to create early-stage chimeric
embryos (embryos of combined heredity) by placing DNA from the nucleus of a
human cell in an animal egg. Rabbit or
cow eggs would be used. The HFEA has
sought legal advice and it encouraged the applications. Two of the groups, led by Stephen Minger at
King's College, London, and Ian Wilmut, the Edinburgh University
scientist whose team created Dolly the cloned sheep, plan to use the chimeric
embryos to create stem cells that carry the genetic defects responsible for
conditions such as motor neurone disease.
The Newcastle group hopes to insert skin cells into animal eggs to identify how
eggs can reprogram adult tissues into more primitive cells. [Guardian
5 October]
Christian doctors in Spain have said they "do not want to be executioners" and that euthanasia is outside the provision of their profession. The statement by the president of the Association of Christian Doctors of Catalonia warned Catalonia's Consultative Bioethics Committee that the acceptance of the first case of euthanasia "will produce a cascade which will include the handicapped, the demented and the elderly." Ferran García-Fària said a person's dignity always had an "absolute intrinsic value". [Zenit, 6 October]
To subscribe to SPUC's email information services, please visit www.spuc.org.uk/em-signup. The reliability of the news herein is dependent on that of the cited sources, which are paraphrased rather than quoted. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the society. © Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, 2012
