Mexico City, Mexico, Oct 21, 2004 / 22:00 pm
The Bishops Conference of Mexico issued a statement this week addressed to President Vicente Fox, calling on the leader to assume responsibility for defending life and to vote against all forms of human cloning at the UN.
The UN is set to decide in the coming days whether or not it will accept a Costa Rican proposal to prohibit all forms of human cloning or approve the request of countries such as Germany and Belgium to allow cloning for therapeutic reasons. Mexico is not among the nations supporting Costa Rica.
The bishops called on Fox “to act with responsibility and respect for our traditions and values by rejecting human cloning in all its forms and for any purpose,” and they recalled that “the Church supports post-natal stem-cell research, but not that which is carried out through the cloning of human embryos.”
In their statement, the bishops stated, “The Catholic Church recognized the kindness, legitimacy and autonomy of research” but “she defends human life, from conception to natural death, without any political, economic or scientific motive.”
In this sense, they explained that “human cloning, as a scientific and technical possibility that could bring medical advances, also contains a serious risk of manipulation of living persons and, eventually, their very disappearance (homicide), once certain scientific and medical goals have been achieved.”
“To pretend to improve the quality of life of some at the cost of manipulating and killing others is not moral. The sound judgment of men and women of good will is that homicide can never be justified,” they said.
According to the bishops, “Mexico’s vote at the United Nations should be coherent with this tradition and with values that are based on human nature, and not on the seesaw of consensus. Mexico plays an important role in the international order and her influence can grow each time she comes down on the side of life in accord with the humanist orientation of our current government.”