Catholic World News News Feature

"Therapeutic" cloning seen as "doubly immoral" February 13, 2004

"No type of human cloning is morally acceptable," insisted Bishop Elio Sgreccia in a February 13 interview on Vatican Radio.

Responding to the news that Korean scientists had successfully cloned a human embryo to produce stem cells for medical research, Bishop Sgreccia-- the vice-president of the Pontifical Academy for Life-- denied that there is an important moral distinction between "reproductive" cloning (in which the goal is to produce a live birth) and "therapeutic" cloning (in which the goal is to harvest stem cells from the cloned embryo. In fact, he argued that the research process of "therapeutic cloning" is "doubly illicit."

"The will to dominate the entire constitution of a human being is in itself immoral-- much more so than eugenicism or racism," the bishop said. That deliberate use of a human being as a means to an end is one reason why the research is morally wrong. The second, he explained, is the production of a human being-- the embryo-- "not by conjugal union between a man and a woman, but by a type of asexual relation." Bishop Sgreccia pointed out that a human derived from cloning would carry only the genetic material of a single individual, rather than from a father and mother.

Thus in therapeutic cloning, scientific researchers are guilty first of carrying out "a procedure that is contrary to nature," and then of "suppressing the cloned embryo," thus taking the life of a human being. He argued that this deliberate destruction of human embryos is "monstrous." He predicted a "political battle" to curb the efforts of scientists and researchers who would look upon human embryos as items to be used "from an industrial perspective."

Bishop Sgreccia also reminded the Vatican Radio audience that there has been no proof that "therapeutic" cloning will produce any real medical breakthroughs. On the contrary, he observed, the results of stem-cell research using embryonic tissues have been disappointing to date. He added that more promising results have been seen in experiments using stem cells obtained from adults, using bone marrow, and from umbilical cords--procedures which do not involve any moral objections.