Indian archbishop says accusations of conversion 'fabricated and baseless'
- Jan 27, 2021
Dr. John Haas, President of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, says that beneath specific conundrums that arise in the field of bioethics these days lies a deeper challenge that the Catholic Church is uniquely equipped to address: A ‘de-valuing’ of human beings, which turns the weak and vulnerable into commodities to be exploited by the wealthy and powerful.
After Sofia Vergara’s court battle over frozen embryos made news, other cases are coming to light. In Colorado one woman is fighting to keep her embryos for future implantation while her ex-husband wants them to be destroyed.
It became official this week: We can now edit the genetic material of embryos. It’s being hailed as a major breakthrough to fight disease, but as the movie “Gattaca” so brilliantly demonstrated two decades ago, there are numerous, profound ethical questions when such a practice is normalized. If we wait for our grandchildren to resolve them, it will be too late.
Critics have seen the idea of a ‘Consistent Ethic of Life’ as code for ignoring or playing down abortion, and in some cases they may have a point, but that’s not how the vast majority of Church leaders such as Pope Francis see it.
In a recent interview with Scientific American, a Spanish biologist named Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte at the California-based Salk Institute claimed that Pope Francis had given an ethical thumbs-up to research on animal/human genetic hybrids. After that report made the rounds, the Vatican issued a swift denial: “It’s absolutely unfounded
As more Americans than ever before turn to in vitro fertilization to create families, a surprising ethical question — what to do with thousands of embryos stuck in a sort of frozen limbo — is dividing US Catholics who call themselves pro-life, with some calling for the embryos to be adopted, while