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Stem Cell

Bishop: "President Obama is forcing all American taxpayers to pay for this homicidal research"

PHOENIX, March 11, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Bishop of Phoenix in Arizona has written a straight-talking column responding to President Barack Obama's executive order providing federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

"This means that American taxpayers will now be paying for the killing of human beings at a very early stage in their lives (as embryos), so that scientific research can make use of them for experiments that may or may not yield positive results," writes Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted in his diocesan newspaper, the Catholic Sun.

Unwilling to sugar-coat the reality with polite euphemisms, Bishop Olmsted says, "We U.S. taxpayers will now be forced to pay, whether we wish to or not, for the killing of our youngest brothers and sisters on the dubious hypothesis that their murders might, in the future, benefit others."

"What President Obama is doing is forcing all American taxpayers to pay for this homicidal research," he said.

The Bishop offers five ways in which Catholics should respond to the President's action.  "First, we must beg forgiveness for this horrendous sin of our nation," he says.  "Second, we Catholics must join with others of good will and make our voices heard across our land, at the White House, on Capitol Hill, in our state Legislatures and in the media. We must not stand by idly while our neighbor's life is at stake. The dignity of a human person does not depend upon his or her age, developmental stage, or ability to function."

To read more see the full column here: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/mar/09031105.html

 

EU Rejects Patent that “Necessarily Involves the Use and Destruction of Human Embryos”

The EU’s patent office has ruled that under the provisions of the European Patent Convention (EPC), it cannot offer a patent for the so-called “WARF/Thomson stem cell application” on the grounds that it would involve the destruction of human embryos. The application is for a method for obtaining embryonic stem cell cultures from primates, including humans, and was filed by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) in 1995.The patent office board of appeal ruled that it is not possible to grant a patent for an invention which necessarily involves the use and destruction of human embryos. The EPC does not allow patenting inventions whose commercial exploitation would be contrary to public order or morality.

Wesley Smith, an American lawyer and writer on bioethics issues, said that the decision is remarkable in that it is the first time there has been an indication from the EU that the moral status of the human embryo is in question.

While a ruling from the patent office does not outlaw the use of embryos in research, Smith writes that it will “send a chill to those who would use embryos commercially.”

“In any event,” Smith wrote, “let us hear no more about religious zealots imposing their will on rational modernists. Europe is as secular a culture as you will find in the world.”

Source: http://catholicexchange.com/2008/12/02/114605/
 

 

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