Madrid, Spain, Feb 16, 2006 / 22:00 pm
Reacting to passage of a new law on assisted reproduction by Spain’s House of Representatives, which would allow genetic selection, cloning and the selling of human embryos, the spokesman for the Bishops’ Conference of Spain, Father Juan Antonio Martinez Camino, said the measure was “very troubling” in its consequences for respect for human life.
Speaking to Europa Press, Father Martinez said the new law “opens the door to human cloning, as it only prohibits reproductive cloning and therefore allows therapeutic cloning.” According to the Spanish priest, the law would also authorize eugenics, that is, “the selecting of human beings, some allowed to live and others allowed to die.” He rejected the freezing or destruction of some human embryos for the purpose of saving only “the best,” or their creation for use in transplant therapies. The human embryo, he continued, should not be treated “as an object of commerce” or denied protection under the law.
Pro-life doctors and researchers, such as the association called “Alternatives Exist,” have also denounced the new law. In a statement the association criticized the law as “one of the most aggressive laws against bioethics in the world” and called it “aberrant attack” on the dignity of man and on science. The new law “turns the unborn human into research material, into merchandise at the mercy of the economic interests of large companies and the ambition of certain scientists,” the group stated, noting as well that the allowing of human cloning for research purposes flies in the face of Spanish law and resolutions by the United Nations and the European Parliament.
The group’s spokesman, Dr. Gador Joya, called the law “an instrument of death and scientific regression.” It turns man into “a means for so-called technological progress, forgetting that science is a means for improving the living conditions of all human beings.”