Word: vaticans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That strongly conservative stand was proclaimed in a 40-page document issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican agency that is responsible for monitoring orthodoxy. Said West Germany's Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the congregation, at a Rome press conference: "What is technologically possible is not also morally admissible." The document is being termed "Ratzinger's catechism" because of its substantial use of a question-and-answer format. Clinical in tone, the text bears the title Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation: Replies to Certain...
...Vatican is not only boldly resisting trends in biological research and medicine but, in the case of a few practices commonly in use, also rejecting the opinions of numerous Roman Catholic moral theologians. The document's release quickly provoked widespread debate not only on the ethics of the reproductive techniques it discusses but on the propriety of the Vatican's attempt to influence public policy on a medical issue, particularly in pluralistic societies. Many Americans claimed the words from Rome would have little impact on daily practices...
...application of a number of the reproductive techniques. This view provides an argument against the in vitro technique because in that process unused fertilized eggs are discarded. However, Dr. Martin Quigley, a Cleveland fertilization expert, denies that any U.S. IVF program "would routinely destroy" an embryo. Claiming the Vatican has been misinformed, he insists that most "spare" embryos are kept for later attempts at pregnancy...
...second principle is that reproduction should occur, as the Instruction says, only "in marriage through the specific and exclusive acts of husband and wife," that is, normal sexual intercourse. In the Vatican view, couples must combine the "unitive" (sexual) and the "procreative" aspects of marriage. Artificial methods of producing children consider only procreation, says Rome, while artificial methods of birth control consider only the sexual aspect. Since artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization bypass the normal "conjugal act," neither method is allowed...
Many Protestants share the Vatican's alarm over the ever braver worlds of human reproduction that advanced biomedical techniques have made possible. Clinics are now assisting in fertilizations involving donor sperm, donor eggs, donor embryos, single women and lesbian couples. Lawyer George Annas, professor of health law at Boston University's School of Medicine, notes the possibility that a child could have five different parents: the father who donates sperm, the mother who produces the ovum, the mother who provides the womb, and the mother and the father who raise the child...