The Spanish Parliament finally approved the bill on biomedical research on 14 June. The law encourages and regulates so-called “therapeutic cloning” in view of the supposed “benefits” and ‘improvements’ it promises for the health of citizens. So Spain becomes the fourth European country to accept therapeutic cloning and the ninth in the world, after the UK, Belgium, Sweden, Japan, Australia, Israel, South Korea and Singapore. The president of the Family Forum, Benigno Blanco, in a statement to the Fides international press agency, said that the new law marks an “ethical retrocession totally open to challenge” because it transforms the human embryo into “mere material” for investigation. “I think the law is profoundly negative because Spain will be one of the countries in the world where the life of the human person in its stages of development will be less protected”, he said. The law, according to Blanco, puts “the interests of pharmacological research and biomedical technology before the ethical imperatives to protect the human embryo”. Negative judgements have also been expressed by the scientific director of VidaCord and member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Mónica López Barahona.
