Madrid, Spain, May 30, 2004 / 22:00 pm
In an article published by the leftist Spanish newspaper “El País,” Manuel Martinez Sospedra, professor of law at the Cardinal Herrera University, said proposed legislation to allow the creation of “therapeutic children” is not only an attack on ethics but also on the Spanish constitution, and therefore, is “against the law."
“Apart from the ethical problems which the bill raises, it also raises problems, and of no small importance, from a constitutional perspective. And the former are not too distant from the latter, although they are distinct,” he pointed out.
According to Martinez Sospedra, the obtaining of “a child through artificial fertilization of the mother in order to harvest biological material needed to cure another person of an illness” is a practice which attacks the human person in his very dignity and is therefore incompatible with the “principles in the national and in the European constitutions,” which protect this value, hence the bill’s “illicit constitutionality.”
The therapeutic child, he continued, also called “medicinal babies,” constitutes “a means to an end: the curing of another.”