POPE AFFIRMS DIGNITY OF FETUS, A PERSON WITH RIGHTS

VATICAN CITY, APR 3, 2000 (VIS) - This morning in the Paul VI Hall the Holy Father addressed the 2,500 participants of an international congress organized by the Institute of Gynecological and Obstetrical Medicine of Rome's La Sapienza University on the theme "Fetus as a Patient."

With this focus, stated the Pope, "your congress considers the fetus in its full human dignity, a dignity which the unborn child possesses from the moment of conception.

"In recent decades, when the sense of the humanity of the fetus has been undermined or distorted by reductive understandings of the human person and by laws which introduce scientifically unfounded qualitative stages in the development of conceived life, the Church has repeatedly affirmed and defended the human dignity of the fetus. By this we mean that 'the human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception; and therefore from that same moment his rights as a person must be respected'."

Saying that "the fetal therapies now emerging" offer new hope for those afflicted with incurable or hard-to-treat pathologies, John Paul II went on to reaffirm that "the various techniques of artificial reproduction, apparently at the service of life, actually open the door to new attacks on life. Apart from the fact that they are morally unacceptable, ... these techniques have a high rate of failure."

"A special case of moral gravity," be asserted, "often deriving from these illicit procedures is so-called 'embryonic reduction', or the elimination of some fetuses when multiple conceptions take place at one time. Such a procedure is gravely illicit .... in the normal course of marital relations but it is doubly reprehensible when they are the result of artificial procreation."

"Whatever the mode of conception - once it happens - the child conceived must be absolutely respected."

In closing, Pope John Paul spoke of the "wondrous and delicate beginnings of human life in the mother's womb," and noted that "Catholic moral teaching strengthens and supports a natural ethic, based on respect for the inviolability of every human life."

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