December 12, 2008

12:30 PM EST

Some twenty years after the publication of the Instruction Donum Vitae (“Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation”), the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith today published a sequel document: Dignitas Personae (“Dignity of the Person”).

Dignitas Personae, while affirming the conclusions of Donum Vitae, strives to apply many of the same principles elucidated in the Congregation’s earlier instruction to shed light on more contemporary developments in the area of biomedical science which bear especially on the marital bond and nascent human life.
    
One of the most prescient assertions in the document is that behind every “no” one might find here, there is a great “yes” to life. The document, intended to inform Catholic consciences on these timely ethical questions, only says “no” to biomedical interventions when the fundamental right to life is under attack or when normal procreation within the bonds of a loving marriage is directly assaulted.

The Instruction, in fact, affirms several cutting edge biomedical developments which steer clear from these pitfalls, among them:  the document endorses infertility treatments that “overcome or correct pathologies and succeed in re-establishing the normal functioning of human procreation;” it affirms as licit somatic cell gene therapy; and it affirms the therapeutic use of stem cells so long as all applicable safeguards are maintained for potential recipients of these therapies and no harm is done to human embryos in the process.

In rejecting recourse to IVF as a means of overcoming marital infertility, Dignitas Personae insists both on the inviolable—and non substitutable—value of the conjugal act of a husband and wife, and on the right of every human person to come into this world, not through the intervention of a laboratory technician, but through the loving marital embrace of that person’s biological mother and father.

The Instruction also touches on two issues that have been of particular interest to our work at the Westchester Institute.

On the question of embryo adoption, the Instruction praises the motivation of couples who want to rescue frozen human embryos left discarded and unwanted in IVF laboratories. Without discarding this as morally viable option, it suggests “various problems” that arise upon considering this as a possibility. As such, the licitness of embryo adoption remains an open question (19).

Altered Nuclear Transfer (ANT), is a proposed method of procuring embryonic-like stem cells by altering the human cloning procedure in an attempt to produce a biological artifact that is not an embryo or a human organism at any point of its development.  While not discarding ANT outright, it reaffirms the need for caution which supporters of ANT have always maintained, namely, it would have to be proved that these techniques do not risk creating and then destroying a human person before they could be attempted in humans (30).      
      
In sum, the Dignitas Personae laudably and energetically insists on the dignity of embryonic human life, and that embryonic human beings are to be dealt with as human persons and to be accorded the kind of treatment we give to fully developed human persons. In so doing, the document is both a sign of contradiction and a candle shining in the darkness.