VATICAN SEEKS GLOBAL BAN ON HUMAN CLONING

February 28, 1997

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Arguing that people have the right to be born "in a human way" and not in a laboratory, the Vatican newspaper on Wednesday made an urgent appeal to governments to ban cloning of humans.

Following the cloning of a sheep in Scotland, U.S. President Bill Clinton earlier this week asked a bioethics advisory commission to review the implications of this research on humans.

The Vatican editorial, by theologian Gino Concetti, in L'Osservatore Romano, was headlined "an urgent appeal to reason and to humanity."

Concetti reminded readers that 10 years earlier the Vatican congregation that watches out for breaches in orthodoxy in Church teaching had written that any attempts, outside a sexual context, were to be considered "contrary to morality in as much as they contrast with the dignity both of human procreation and of the conjugal union.

"Every different way or methodology is not acceptable because it contradicts above all the creative plan of God and also because it offends the dignity of the person and of marriage," Concetti wrote.

"Persons have the right to be born in a human way and not in a laboratory. Going against these principles should be interpreted not as opposition to science or as a brake on progress, but as safeguarding those values which constitute the human being and its existence," the editorial continued.