Spain: Embryo can never be used for an end that is not for its own good

Madrid, Spain, May 26, 2004 / 22:00 pm

Responding to the recent decision by the National Committee for Assisted Reproduction in Spain to request legal authorization for the creation of “babies a la carte,” the head of the Biopathology Department of Faith Hospital in Valencia, Justo Aznar, said “an embryo can never be used for an end that is not for its own good.”

Dr. Aznar expressed his objections to the request that would authorize the creation of “medicinal babies,” saying that “independently of the fact that human embryos can never be used for an end that is not for their own good, I believe this technique has an additional difficult, that of the destruction of healthy embryos.”

Aznar warned that, in addition to proposing the creation of embryos to be used as donors of cells and tissues (“medicinal babies”), the report seeks to modify regulations governing the number of embryos that created and implanted and obtain authorization to use frozen embryos left over from in vitro fertilizations for medical experiments.

In regards to the problem of frozen embryos in Spain, Aznar said the proposed law, as it has been drafted, “is not going to resolve this problem” since “the numerous exceptions that have been introduced to allow the creation or implantation of more than three embryos makes the law practically ineffective at preventing the excessive creation of embryos which afterwards will be frozen.”

“Neither will it prevent multiple fertilizations, leading to embryo reduction, which simply ends the life of ‘extra’ embryos from these multiple pregnancies,” he added.

Likewise Aznar expressed his disagreement with the Government’s intention to facilitate research with human embryos, “since that will open the possibility for them to be used as material for experiments, something totally incompatible with their human dignity.”