My name is Peter Cataldo and I am Director of Research at The National Catholic Bioethics Center in Brighton, Massachusetts. I thank the Committee for the opportunity to provide testimony today.

I would like to present some of the reasons why the Roman Catholic Church teaches that human cloning in any form is a serious offence against human dignity and should be prohibited. As a preface to my remarks, it is important to understand that the teaching of the Church on this subject is not any less credible because it originates from a religious body. Rather, the Church’s teaching respects and defers to the findings of science and incorporates the natural moral law, which is open and applicable to all. Indeed, Catholics are held to believe the Church’s teaching in these matters in part because of these two universal sources of human knowledge and action.

The question of cloning "whole human beings" in reproductive cloning, as distinct from therapeutic cloning, is a distinction without a difference from a moral point of view. The particular future of an embryo does not make a difference to its status as a human being. In both therapeutic and reproductive cloning a human being is engendered who is a legitimate bearer of human rights. The fact that in one case and not in the other the embryo is allowed to progress into later stages of development, or that an estimated 50-80% of embryos in natural gestation never implant and die, or that the embryo prevented from implanting is destined to die, do not make an essential difference to whether the embryo is, per se, a human being.

These are all circumstances which are extraneous to what it means to be an actual human being. If an embryo possesses the complete human genome and has an intrinsic unity in which all of its parts act for the integral good of the whole, then it exists as a human being, and not as a formless, aimless "ball of cells," nor as mere "cellular life." Moreover, the fact that the cells of the early embryo are not yet differentiated, but are totipotent and can become another embryo if separated, does not alter the reality that at any given point in its development the embryo functions as one unified organism. The early embryo is only potentially, not actually, divisible into another embryo. It is actually one, unified being with a human nature. The human embryo, in other words, is a human being.[1]

This fact is a sufficient basis upon which to treat the embryo as a subject of fundamental human rights which the Catholic Church has consistently maintained. "Human embryos obtained in vitro," the Church teaches, "are human beings and subjects with rights: their dignity and right to life must be respected from the first moment of their existence. It is immoral to produce human embryos destined to be exploited as disposable ‘biological material’ (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation I, 5)." Human cloning in any form represents the ultimate domination over, and manipulation of, some human beings by others. But this conclusion is not the end of the story, because the Church embraces science at its core, and encourages any means to cure or ameliorate disease which respects human dignity, including the proven and promising alternatives of adult and cord blood stem cell research.

Thank you.