ON THE QUESTION OF FROZEN EMBRYOS

VATICAN CITY, JUL 23, 1996 (VIS) - An article on "The Question of Frozen Embryos," appearing in today's L'Osservatore Romano, was also released by the Holy See Press Office. It looks at the "delicate moral problems" of "the modern techniques of artificial insemination" and recalls Pope John Paul's appeal on May 25, 1996, "to stop the production and freezing of human embryos."

"Embryos, conceived 'in vitro' in a number exceeding the possibility of simultaneous transfer into the mother," says the article, "are frozen with a view to repeating the embryo transfer in the case, not infrequent, of an unsuccessful first attempt, ... while awaiting transfer to a surrogate mother ... or to allow time to conduct genetic tests ... so as to transfer only quality embryos, eliminating defective ones."

The techniques of cryo-preservation, applied to animals in the 1970s and to man in the 1980s "are however very risky for the integrity and survival of the embryos, the majority of whom die or undergo irreparable damage, both in the freezing and thawing stages."

"Notwithstanding this alarming biomedical data," continues the article, "the great majority of existing legislation does not place limits on the number of embryos that can be produced in an 'in vitro' fertilization and therefore the most common situation is that there is a surplus of embryos, whose cryo- preservation is allowed, generally for transfer to the mother but at times for donation or experimentation."

"In fact, legislation which permits the cryo-preservation of embryos ... usually indicates only the maximum length of the cryo-preservation, which varies from country to country, from one to five years. ... This is a question of a prenatal slaughter, a killing (which) is not simply tolerated, but programmed and ordered by the very civil legislator transformed ... into an instrument of a perverse logic of violence and death."

"The ethical and juridical knot lies in recognizing the human qualities of the embryo and therefore in the persuasion that 'the fruit of human generation from the first moment of its existence, that is to say from the formation of the zygote, demands the unconditioned respect which is morally owed to the human being in its corporal and spiritual totality."

"Current usage is based, instead, on the denial of the embryo's ... being counted among human beings, a negation underlined by the ambiguous notion of 'pre-embryo.'

The article points out that "Donum Vitae," the 1987 Instruction by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, stated that the freezing of embryos "even if done to guarantee the preservation of life of the embryo - cryo- preservation - constitutes an offense to the respect due to human beings, in that it exposes them to grave risks of death or harm for their physical integrity, deprives them, at least temporarily, of maternal reception and gestation and places them in a situation susceptible to further offenses and manipulations."

"It is not therefore licit to produce embryos 'in vitro', and even less so to produce them voluntarily in abundance, so as to make cryo-preservation necessary."

Frozen embryos, concludes the article, "are a striking example of the inextricable labyrinths in which science is imprisoned when it places itself at the service of particular interests and not at the authentic good of man, at the service of desire alone and not of reason."
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