Madrid, Spain, Feb 19, 2006 / 22:00 pm
In an interview with the Archdiocese of Madrid’s news service Analisis Digital, the president of the Spanish Bishops’ Subcommittee on Family and Life, Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Pla, denounced the new law on assisted reproduction passed last week by the country’s House of Representatives, saying it opened the doors to such horrors as “bio-adultery and genetic incest.” The new law, he warned, would lead to “the silent and unstoppable suicide of our civilization.”
Bishop Reig called the new measure a “weapon of mass destruction of human lives” that constitutes an “attack on at least ten fundamental human rights.” He said it would facilitate “murderous behavior” by allowing the creation of “thousands of ‘leftover’ embryos that are frozen and condemned to an uncertain future.” The decision of who can be considered a person and who not would be arbitrarily left to the individual, he said, as during the first two weeks of life the human embryo is to be considered “mere biological material.”
Bishop Reig also decried the new law’s manipulation of language with its use of the term “pre-embryo,” which he said was a “deceptive” distortion of scientific terminology with no basis in biology.
The power to decide who lives and who dies constitutes a true “silent holocaust,” he added.
The new law would allow the cloning and harvesting human embryos for so-called “medical” purposes, which Bishop Reig said “introduces the dangerous precedent of the ends justifying the means.”