Again through the Bioethics Commission, the Swiss bishops, in a statement issued on 7 June, have censured “medicine babies” and eugenics as “an odious practice and “ethically unacceptable”: they recalled the case of the first “medicine baby” of Swiss nationality, a baby girl conceived and born in a laboratory in Brussels in January 2005 to donate its bone marrow to her seriously ill 6-year-old brother. “While it is not right to criticise the subjective intention of the parents who have suffered – explain the Swiss bishops – and while we are delighted by the cure of the little boy, the fact remains that the technique of medicine babies represents a disquieting form of eugenics”. The bishops further explain that this technique involves the production of 20 or 30 human embryos that will then be destroyed “as common merchandise” after having found a single embryo compatible with the sick person. “The noble end of curing the patient – they emphasise – does not justify the killing of embryos that are individuals of the human species”. “Eugenics – they declare – is an odious practice that consists in selecting the babies to be born on the basis of utilitarian criteria that fail to respect their intrinsic dignity”. The practice of medicine babies, in particular, “is a shameful form of eugenics, even if surrounded by commendable sentiments”. The bishops also refer to a provision of the Swiss Parliament in 2005, which accepted negative eugenics (suppression of embryos revealing undesirable genetic characteristics), while rejecting positive eugenics (selection of an acceptable embryo). Both practices, in the view of the Swiss Church, are “ethically unsound and unrealistic” because they involve in any case the “exploitation of the human individual”. “Switzerland – say the bishops – must give a clear signal by prohibiting medicine babies and any other form of the exploitation of human embryos”. Alternative ways, in their view, may be found in the promotion of the culture of the gift (of organs, blood and bone marrow) by adults: that would “make recourse to medicine babies superfluous”.
