Spanish experts says “therapeutic child” is unethical and against the law

Madrid, Spain, May 30, 2004 / 22:00 pm

In an article published by the leftist Spanish newspaper “El País,” Manuel Martinez Sospedra, professor of law at the Cardinal Herrera University, said proposed legislation to allow the creation of “therapeutic children” is not only an attack on ethics but also on the Spanish constitution, and therefore, is “against the law."

“Apart from the ethical problems which the bill raises, it also raises problems, and of no small importance, from a constitutional perspective.  And the former are not too distant from the latter, although they are distinct,” he pointed out.

According to Martinez Sospedra, the obtaining of “a child through artificial fertilization of the mother in order to harvest biological material needed to cure another person of an illness” is a practice which attacks the human person in his very dignity and is therefore incompatible with the “principles in the national and in the European constitutions,” which protect this value, hence the bill’s “illicit constitutionality.”

The therapeutic child, he continued, also called “medicinal babies,” constitutes “a means to an end: the curing of another.” 

“For this reason what is being attacked is a human being in his very dignity, and in a completely radical way, because he is not being used for this or that aspect of his activity, but rather for his very being and very existence,” he added.

For the Spanish professor, “from a constitutional perspective the issue of therapeutic children leaves little room for doubt.”

“The system of laws embodied in the Constitution is a system of human rights,” which is reflected in the Universal Declaration and, soon, in the European constitution.  “Since the Universal Declaration, the systems of law that have followed are based upon the same principle: human dignity, from which each and every fundamental right is derived,” he explained.

“Dignity consists in being of value in and of oneself, and not in relation to others, and therefore, in demanding and obtaining unconditional respect.  Dignity is what separates us from the things of the world, which have value not in or of themselves, but in relation to others,” Martinez Sospedra said.

Lastly, Martinez Sospedra said that “from this constitutional illicitness, one is able to deduce that this practice lies completely outside the realm of democratic principles, for exactly the same reasons as the death penalty, torture and slavery.  The therapeutic child is ‘against the law’ in the strongest sense of the word.”