Contact: Ray Delisle 508-7915357

Office of Communications, Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester

The Catholic Church applauds the efforts of those scientists who, in their quest for bettering the human condition, respect the dignity of life at all its stages.

However, when achieving a noble end, including cures for debilitating diseases, involves ignoble means, namely cloning embryonic human life for the sole purpose of destroying it, the Church must stand in opposition to human cloning and join with those who understand the broader dangers of such actions. Can a majority of the scientific community, our House of Representatives and countless religious and community leaders be wrong in condemning such research?

one does not need to be a cell-line researcher to recognize why noble ends cannot justify morally repugnant means. Cloning, even so-called therapeutic or experimental cloning, creates a new life without a father, and reduces a mother to the provider of an almost emptied egg. Nonetheless, it is a new human life and the determination to destroy it and limit its use to scientific research for the therapeutic ends compound further the moral issues rather than protect mankind. As such, cloning embryonic human life under any circumstances crosses an ethical line, takes an irrevocable step, from which science can never turn back.

Cloning human beings even at the embryonic stage is rife with other moral dilemmas from many philosophical viewpoints. It robs people of their gift of individuality; it reduces reproduction to a manufacturing process devoid of love or even human interaction; worse still, it treats human life as a commodity to be owned and traded, bought and sold. It is the manufacture of a separate class of life for enslavement.

Since adult stem cell research has shown equal if not greater promise utilizing morally acceptable means, the need for therapeutic cloning is still not clear. i ask that our legislators move swiftly to ban human cloning for the protection of our Commonwealth and humanity as a whole and, in so doing, publicy acknowledge this scientific breakthrough for what it is --an ethical breakdown.

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