OCEANIA/AUSTRALIA - Catholic Bishops of Australia : “No to new Bills which create a new contempt for life by: Creating embryos purely for the purpose of destruction”

Sydney (Agenzia Fides) - Cloning is an act of contempt for life and can neither be authorised nor regulated by law. This is the position of the Catholic Bishops of Australia expressed in a press statement titled “Human Embryo Research: A New Controversy”,
issued as the Australian parliament and the wider community are engaged in a very important debate over whether to allow human embryos to be deliberately created and then destroyed for scientific research.
The Bishops recall that the Catholic Church is not opposed to research on adult stem cells and those derived from umbilical cord blood, indeed “Our Church supports ethical stem cell research through its research institutes, healthcare services, teaching hospitals and health professionals.”.
But the Bishops say, the proposals now before the Federal Parliament seek to radically revise the decision taken by the same parliament in 2002, to prevent human cloning but allowing embryonic stem cell lines to be extracted from viable human embryos ‘left over’ from the IVF process. At the time the Bishops warned the government that it had a new and dangerous line by ‘creating an expendable class of human life’.
“These new Bills, however, create a new contempt for life by: Creating embryos purely for the purpose of destruction, further dehumanising the human embryo. Introducing new categories of human embryos, including clones and embryos with mixed DNA.”
The Bishops criticise the misleading and harmful use of deceptive terms such as ‘therapeutic’ cloning where no such therapies exist.
The Bishops recall “We were all embryos once. Within those cells which comprise the embryo, lies all the genetic information which is essential to the people that we are today. The human embryo cannot continue to develop as anything other than a human being. Therefore, it has intrinsic human dignity and should be afforded that most basic of human rights -”, underlining that this is not a religious argument, it is a matter of anthropology. (PA) (Agenzia Fides 11/10/2006 righe 28 parole 282)