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Catholic World News News Feature

Attacks on human life increasing, Pope warns February 26, 2007

Attacks against the right to life are increasing, Pope Benedict XVI warned members of the Pontifical Academy for Life during a private audience on February 24.

The Holy Father expressed particular concern about “the obsessive search for the perfect child.” The use of advanced biotechnology, he warned, threatens to unleash “a new wave of eugenic discrimination.”

In his remarks to the members of the Pontifical Academy, who had gathered in Rome for their 13th general assembly, the Pope remarked that arguments in defense of life are based not upon sectarian religious beliefs but on “the natural law written on the heart,” and therefore accessible to “all people of sound conscience.”

Despite the inherent logic of the arguments for life, the Pontiff continued, assaults on human dignity are proliferating. He listed the drive for legalization of abortion in Latin America, the use of “new forms of chemical abortion under the pretext of reproductive health,” the mounting international campaign for population-control measures, the quest for “designer babies,” the pressure for legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide, and the drive to obtain government recognition for “forms of cohabitation alternative to marriage and closed to natural procreation."

In light of these dangers, the Pope said, Christians have an urgent responsibility to educate their neighbors, to counteract “the inclination of the masses and the flattery of propaganda."

“Life is the primary good we have received from God, the foundation of all the others,” the Pope pointed out. The campaign to protect that gift “is a duty upon which the future of humanity depends."