The New Reproductive Technologies: An Overview and Theological Assessment

The Catholic Theology of Genetic Manipulation

“…10 Grabowski concurs and adds, “Such procedures are morally objectionable because they depersonalize the children conceived by them. It substitutes the personal relations constitutive of our identity as persons with the impersonal ones of producer and consumer and product.” 11 In short, the Catholic Church very much wants to see all children and people as highly respected and revered, and Catholic theology states that artificial fertilization reduces this respect, and hence is morally wrong.…”

“…First, cloning tends to make bisexuality (in the sense of two people, man and woman) a functional leftover, given that a clone can be made from a single “parent.” 13 Second, cloning reduces the holiness and sacredness of life. As Grabowski explains, “Cloning attacks the personhood of those it produces by mocking the uniqueness and irreducibility of the person through the attempt to make a genetic photocopy of the individual.” 14 Thus, the Church opposes all forms of human reproductive cloning.…”

“…Grabowski accurately describes this as he writes, “reproductive cloning is a term employed to describe the effort to create a genetic double of a human being in the form of an embryo, and to carry that embryo to full term pregnancy. Reproductive cloning is distinctly different from the effort to clone individual cells or tissues for therapeutic purposes.” 2 Thus, reproductive cloning involves reproduction of an entire organism, in which case the duplicate is genetically identical to the “parent.”…”