Catholic Studies

Catholic Studies

The Catholic Church has the highest regard for human life and human dignity from the beginning of life at conception until natural death.

Human cloning, that is the creation of a human embryo through scientific means, does injury to the dignity of humanity. Will these children be brought up in loving families or treated as laboratory experiments or sources for spare parts?

Every human being is entitled to human rights including cloned human embryos. If created, they should be treated with the same rights and respect of any other human being as a child of God.

The Catholic Church is not just against cloning, it is pro-life in the widest sense. This is often called a "Consistent Ethic of Life."

This pro-life stance stresses the highest regard for dignity of human life including that of:
- All people in objecting to unjust war and nuclear arms.
- The unborn in objecting to to abortion, in fitro fertilization, frozen embryos, embryonic stem cell research, and cloning
- The elderly, sick and dying in objecting to assisted suicide and euthanazia
- Prisoners in objecting to the death penalty
- The poor and minorities in supporting social justice issues.
Roman Catholicism and other Christian denominations believe that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception when the sperm and egg unite. They feel harvesting cells for embryonic cloningis tantamount to live human experimentation and contrary to God's will. Further, they maintain producing cloned zygotes that are unlikely to survive is tantamount to murder. Some Christian conservatives express concern that cloned embryos would have no soul, since it was, in their view, born outside of God's parameters. (Even though some believe Eve was a clone of Adam via Genesis 2:22. Then the Lord God made a woman from the part he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.)
Other Christian traditions like the United Church of Christ do not believe a fertilized ovum constitutes a person. They...