Mexico City, Mexico, Oct 21, 2004 / 22:00 pm
The Bishops Conference of Mexico issued a statement this week addressed to President Vicente Fox, calling on the leader to assume responsibility for defending life and to vote against all forms of human cloning at the UN.
The UN is set to decide in the coming days whether or not it will accept a Costa Rican proposal to prohibit all forms of human cloning or approve the request of countries such as Germany and Belgium to allow cloning for therapeutic reasons. Mexico is not among the nations supporting Costa Rica.
The bishops called on Fox “to act with responsibility and respect for our traditions and values by rejecting human cloning in all its forms and for any purpose,” and they recalled that “the Church supports post-natal stem-cell research, but not that which is carried out through the cloning of human embryos.”
In their statement, the bishops stated, “The Catholic Church recognized the kindness, legitimacy and autonomy of research” but “she defends human life, from conception to natural death, without any political, economic or scientific motive.”