Adopting embryos raises moral questions
No fully moral solution exists for dealing with frozen embryos, not even the idea of adopting or "rescuing" abandoned embryos to bring them to full development and birth, Vatican officials said.

"It is worse than a dead end, which has only one way out; this has none," said Bishop Elio Sgreccia, former president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, who helped prepare the Vatican's new bioethics document.

After years of study and debate over the morality of adopting frozen embryos, the Vatican did not rule out the practice, but "Dignitas Personae" ("The Dignity of a Person"), released Dec. 12 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the idea raises serious ethical concerns.

"It needs to be recognized that the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved," said the document.

The only completely moral way of acting is to stop creating and freezing embryos, which have the dignity of human beings, said the document.

Speaking at the Vatican press conference to explain the document, Bishop Sgreccia told reporters: "The basic advice, explicitly stated in the document, is that embryos must not be frozen. It is one of those actions that has no remedy. Once it is done, correcting it implies committing another error."

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, current president of the academy, told reporters that "the discussion is still open" and the Vatican has not ruled out the possibility of embryo adoption completely, although it is leaning toward a completely negative judgment because embryo adoption involves the future parents in an immoral process.

Maria Luisa DiPietro, a professor of bioethics at Rome's Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and president of the Italian Science and Life Association, said that 50-80 percent of frozen embryos do not survive thawing and a significant percentage of those that remain viable will have serious abnormalities.

"I doubt that a woman would accept the transfer of embryos independent of the condition they are in," she said.

Most likely the couple and the treating physician would insist on pre-implantation testing and selection, "adding a further injustice," DiPietro said. "This is one of the reasons that led to prudence" in the Vatican document.

In the end, DiPietro said, the most morally acceptable practice might be to keep the embryos frozen until they naturally are no longer viable.

When asked if the principle of a "lesser evil" might legitimate adopting the embryos to give them life, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, said that the church always has condemned freezing embryos "and does not have an obligation to indicate a moral way out."

The new document said that embryo adoption, "solely in order to allow human beings to be born who are otherwise condemned to destruction," is "praiseworthy with regard to the intention of respecting and defending human life."

The practice "presents, however, various problems not dissimilar to those mentioned above" in the document's discussion of the morally unacceptable practice of making the embryos available to "infertile couples as a treatment for infertility," it said.

The document specifically cited ethical norms that make "artificial heterologous procreation illicit as well as any form of surrogate motherhood."

Heterologous procreation refers to procedures in which both the egg and the sperm come from donors other than the couple having the baby.

Many Catholic moral theologians and other church leaders had hoped the document would resolve a lively debate over the morality of adopting abandoned embryos and having them implanted in a woman's womb with the hope of bringing them to term and welcoming the child into a loving family.

Some theologians have said that, since a central criterion for making bioethical judgments is the defense of the right to life even though the creation and freezing of the embryos is immoral, rescuing them from long-term freezing and possible destruction is not only morally acceptable, but laudatory.

Others have argued that giving birth to a baby conceived immorally would be cooperation in that immoral act; that it would involve surrogate motherhood, which is also condemned by the church; and that it involves the adoptive parents in embryo-transfer procedures, which are themselves illicit because they separate fertility from sexual intercourse between a husband and wife.

Also, moral theologians have expressed concern about the fact that adoptive parents would themselves have to keep the embryos frozen until the adoptive mother reaches the optimal point in her monthly cycle and that the choice of which embryos to adopt --- for instance, based on the donors' race --- could involve the adoptive couple in treating the embryos as a commodity.

In addition, some moral theologians have expressed concern that if the church says embryo adoption or "rescue" is morally permissible it could appear to the public to be agreeing that some good can come from a process that it says is always morally wrong.

According to the Embryo Adoption Awareness Center, run by Nightlight Christian Adoptions, there are almost 500,000 frozen embryos in storage in the United States. The California-based adoption agency said in September that since 1998 its embryo adoption program had led to the birth of 170 babies and that 26 women were pregnant with formerly frozen embryos.

Human cloning: Immoral
The Vatican's new instruction on bioethics strongly condemns human cloning, whether performed to obtain embryonic stem cells or to produce a genetically predetermined child.

Human cloning already was declared immoral by a similar Vatican instruction in 1987. Since then, however, cloning at the embryo stage has moved from the theoretical to the practical, and the effort to produce living human beings through cloning has made significant progress.

"Dignitas Personae" said human cloning embodies many of the moral and ethical problems found in modern biological technology.

It said human cloning falls into two main categories: reproduction, in order to obtain the birth of a baby; and medical therapy or research, in order to produce embryonic stem cells with a predetermined genetic patrimony that can overcome the problem of immune-system rejection.

At a basic level, it said, all human cloning is intrinsically illicit because it seeks to produce a new human being without a connection to the act of conjugal love in marriage.

More specifically, it said, reproductive cloning is seen by some as a way to obtain control over human evolution, to select human beings with superior qualities or to produce a child who is a copy of another. The document said these justifications overlook the offense to human identity and human dignity that cloning represents.

"If cloning were to be done for reproduction, this would impose on the resulting individual a predetermined genetic identity, subjecting him ... to a form of biological slavery from which it would be difficult to free himself," it said.

"The fact that someone would arrogate to himself the right to determine arbitrarily the genetic characteristics of another person represents a grave offense to the dignity of that person as well as to the fundamental equality of all people," it said.

The document went on to state that the originality of every person is a consequence of the particular relationship that exists between God and a human being from the first moment of his existence.

Therapeutic cloning is even more serious from the ethical point of view, the document said.

"To create embryos with the intention of destroying them, even with the intention of helping the sick, is completely incompatible with human dignity because it makes the existence of a human being at the embryonic stage nothing more than a means to be used and destroyed. It is gravely immoral to sacrifice a human life for therapeutic ends," it said.

The instruction referred briefly, and with caution, to new techniques in human cloning that are aimed at producing stem cells of an embryonic type, but without implying the destruction of true embryos. The Vatican document said scientific and ethical questions remain about the status of the "product" obtained in this way.

Until these doubts have been clarified, it said, the statement of the 1995 encyclical "Evangelium Vitae" ("The Gospel of Life") must be kept in mind: "What is at stake is so important that, from the standpoint of moral obligation, the mere probability that a human person is involved would suffice to justify an absolutely clear prohibition of any intervention aimed at killing a human embryo."

The advances in developing techniques for producing embryo-like stem cells without creating or destroying human embryos have drawn tentative statements of support from some church experts. The techniques include "altered nuclear transfer" and "oocyte-assisted reprogramming," which, using an unfertilized human egg and the nucleus of another cell, replace or reprogram genes so that pluripotent stem cells --- those that can develop into any bodily tissue --- are produced, but not a human embryo.

Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the U.S. bishops' Office of Pro-Life Activities, said a newer technology --- induced pluripotent stem cells, through which ordinary body cells can be coaxed into becoming any cell in the body, as embryonic stem cells can be --- "is not a target of any of the concerns raised" in the Vatican document.

He also said the altered nuclear transfer and oocyte-assisted reprogramming techniques "have lost a lot of attention" in the scientific world with the development of induced pluripotent stem cells, which are "less controversial and more effective" than the other technologies.

Parents may allow kids to get vaccines linked to abortion
Parents may allow their children to be inoculated with vaccines that were produced with cells of illicit origin, said a top Vatican official.

However, Catholics also must urge doctors and pharmaceutical companies to let alternative, less controversial vaccines become more widely available for use, said Bishop Sgreccia.

The document said, however, that researchers and people involved in marketing vaccines have "the duty to avoid cooperation in evil and scandal" and must "refuse to use such biological material even when there is no close connection between the researcher" and those who destroyed the embryo or performed the abortion.

The use of human embryos or fetuses for research or the production of vaccines and other products is immoral and "constitutes a crime against (the embryos') dignity as human beings," said "Dignitas Personae."

Human cell lines coming from abortions cannot be prepared or used ethically by researchers even if they were obtained commercially from a different research facility, the document said.

However, some "grave reasons may be morally proportionate to justify the use of such 'biological material,'" it said.

For example, guaranteeing the health of a child "could permit parents to use a vaccine that was developed using cell lines of illicit origin," it said.

But everyone, including doctors and parents, "has the duty to make known their disagreement and to ask that their health care system make other types of vaccines available," the document said.

The human cell lines used to cultivate the production of many vaccines used today come from tissue derived from two human fetuses aborted in 1964 and 1970.

Because the abortions occurred so long ago, Bishop Sgreccia said a parent's consent to use vaccines associated with those cell lines does not reflect any form of cooperation with the evil of the original abortions.

There is no risk of causing scandal either, he said, because using such vaccines in no way encourages more abortions.

While parents are not obliged to vaccinate their child, they do have a duty to protect their child's health, he said.

Some governments and schools, however, do mandate that children be inoculated in efforts to stop the spread of certain infectious diseases, he said.

For this reason, national health systems must "change course" and substitute controversial vaccines for alternatives so Catholics will no longer be forced to act against their consciences, he said.

Bishop Sgreccia said effective vaccines that are not derived from human embryos or fetuses are being produced and are on the market, but that they are not always available in every country.

He said pharmaceutical companies that have a large surplus of vaccines prepared from human cell lines would lose money if they switched to new vaccine preparations, but parents should continue to put pressure on these companies and health care providers, urging them to let these new vaccines become available for use.

---CNS