The Vatican on Friday issued a statement condemning advanced infertility treatments and newer forms of contraception such as the "morning after" pill.
The church's highest doctrinal body reaffirmed its long-standing prohibition of in-vitro fertilization and also cloning and embryonic stem cell research. Church officials said the document was meant as an update to a 1987 statement under Pope John Paul II.
Experts are saying there was little new in Friday's statement -- it covers medical advances that were not around in 1987, according to Religion News Service.
Like the 1987 document, the statement condemns in-vitro and all other techniques that involve "replacement of the conjugal act by a technical procedure." Read more here, here and here.
From the AP:
(The document) stopped short of issuing an explicit no to "embryo adoption," whereby infertile couples adopt embryos that were frozen during in vitro techniques and subsequently abandoned. It said that while the intent was "praiseworthy," the result posed legal, medical and psychological problems.
Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, emeritus professor of medicine and medical ethics at Georgetown University and the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, said that vagueness indicated that the question of embryo adoption "is still a little bit open.""That means we're not issuing dicta on things which may be questionable," he said in an interview from Washington.
He said the document was valuable not because it contained any new pronouncements, but because it made explicit, and in one authoritative place, Vatican positions on issues that have emerged since the last such document was published in 1987, "Donum Vitae," or "Gift of Life."
The U.S. Catholic bishops issued a Q&A and a news release.
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