SPAIN
“Eugenics isn’t a cure”, declare the Spanish bishops in a press release issued in recent days, in response to the birth of a baby girl in Seville on 23 July, “selected” with pre-implant genetic diagnosis. Selecting embryos, underline the bishops, “cures no one” and is “eugenic” because “it selects healthy embryos and eliminates unhealthy ones”. Moreover, the baby girl born in Seville last Sunday using a technique of embryo selection “has been cured of nothing” because healthy from the start. But “the happy fact of the birth of a healthy baby – continue the bishops – is not in itself enough to present as progress some practices that have disregarded the right to life of that baby’s brothers and sisters generated in vitro”. The bishops regret that the media should have emphasized the fact that the baby girl was freed from a hereditary disease. They also deplore that it should be possible to celebrate as progress what “the public health service now places within the reach of parents who suffer from diseases that could be transmitted to their children”. The truth is, they conclude, that the “elimination of embryos, whether they are diseased or healthy, is a grave violation of the fundamental right to life in the very first phases of its development”.
