Montreal, Canada, Aug 23, 2004 / 22:00 pm
A well-respected medical ethicist from one of Canada’s leading universities says Canada must not legalize embryonic cloning for any purpose, including therapeutic purposes.
Margaret Somerville, founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University in Montreal, makes her case from a purely academic and secular perspective in a comment published in the National Post last week, called “The ethics of stem cells.”
In her article, Somerville says Canada’s Assisted Human Reproduction Act “reflects the view that to create embryos other than by sexual reproduction and other than to help people have children is inherently wrong.”
While Somerville does not seem to disagree with the creation of embryos for in vitro fertilization, she states that embryos are indeed human life that should be respected.