EUROPE/SPAIN - Approved Law on Assisted Human Reproduction meets with protests: “the unborn child is reduced to matter for experimentation and goods at the mercy of pharmaceutical economic interests and ambitions in certain scientific circles”

Madrid (Fides Service) - A new recently approved Law on Assisted Human Reproduction has met with protest from various sides. The law is denounced for going against Natural Law, allowing the ‘production’ of human persons and the arbitrary determination of who is a person and who is not; it manipulates language to manipulate consciences and the law; it introduces the dangerous precedent that the end justifies the means; it allows “therapeutic” cloning and therefore does not exclude human cloning; it legalises the arbitrary manipulation of life allowing fertilisation of animals eggs with human sperm a practice with unforeseeable consequences.
According to Hay Alternativas platform the new Spanish law is “one of the most aggressive anti bio-ethics law in the world” ... “a tool of death and scientific retrocession”. “The law - says platform spokesman Dr. Gádor Joya-“reduces the unborn child to material for investigation, goods at the mercy of the economic interests of large companies and the ambition of certain scientific circles”. The vice president of FEF the Spanish Family Forum Benigno Blanco said the law is “a step backwards in defence of human life in the first stage of development”. An FEF statement denounces the law “which subordinates the right to life to technological experimentation and abuse” and warns “Spain will be one of the country’s in Europe where the human embryo is less protected and where legislators renounce any ethic consideration to support mere technological progress”.
The chairman of Spain’s Family Policy Institute Eudardo Hertfelder recalled that “the law is supposed to protect the human embryo. Here instead it not only denies its rights, it eliminates the human embryo altogether”. Professionals for Ethics organisation says the law is a violation of human dignity and denounces the fact that “from now on a human person may be allowed to be born or destroyed or used for experiments”.
“The information proposed by the government and the media on the new LRHA was another clear example of the constant manipulation of information to which we are subject”, says the platform for the Promotion of the Family PROFAM: “they say human cloning for therapeutic purposes is respectable and progressive, what they don’t say is that it robs the human person of his or her innate dignity”. (RG) (Agenzia Fides 24/2/2006 - righe 32, parole 448)