Human Embryo Threatened by Legal Chaos, Says Forum

The human embryo is caught in the cross fire between medical reality and legal chaos, an international bioethics forum in Brussels concluded. Some 600 people attended the two-day forum in late October. Medicine and the Dignity of Man, an international association that originated in France, organized the meeting. The objective of the forum, as well as that of the association, is to "promote a medical ethic founded on the principles of the dignity of the human being and of respect for every human life" (see www.theembryo.com). During the forum, a group of scientists and doctors addressed the biomedical questions arising from procedures on the human embryo.

A group of eminent European jurists addressed the legal questions that affect the human embryo. They stated that the documents of the Council of Europe, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, and the legislation of various nations cause "legal chaos." Martha Tarasco Michel, professor of the School of Bioethics of the University of Anahuac in Mexico, spoke about the narcissistic projection of parents in the unborn child, which promotes the "myth of the perfect child."

At the end of the congress, Elizabeth Bourgois, president of Medicine and the Dignity of Man, presented the forum's final resolutions, which state: "Even before constituting a problem of civil and penal law, respect for the human being is above all an exigency of civilization." Because of this, the participants appealed to the European Union and its member states to take "the indispensable legislative measures to defend, protect and promote every human person, ensuring his/her protection with the law from his/her conception."

In the second place, they request that the legislation prohibit "every form of manipulation of the human embryo, its cloning, destruction or mutilation." Forum participants "are opposed to the subsidizing of research that, systematically manipulating human embryos, violates in them the dignity of humanity." They commit themselves "to favor urgently all research on stem cells, but only if they are adult stem cells." Lastly, they "commit themselves to favor research on the treatment of genetic diseases without destroying or mutilating sick embryos."

Family Update, November-December 2002, p. 3