Human cloning.

Position Paper of the Catholic Medical Association

Catholic teaching on the dignity and uniqueness of every human person is founded upon biblical and natural truths that have guided our Western Civilization up to our modern era. Implications of that teaching are clear.

God chose Adam and Eve to be the first husband and wife, the first parents. From the beginning God created marriage to fill Heaven with saints. Marriage today has that same divine purpose. In the love between husband and wife, God creates children to be reared and educated by the parents. This is the norm. Any deviation from normalcy could interfere with God's plan for children at His choice. Any technology which seeks to create human life outside the normative conjugal act of husband and wife is immoral, precisely because it circumvents God's plan for generation of the human person.

Each human person is new, unique and exists by creation before any of its parts, including the soul. The human person is at once corporeal and spiritual. Soul, intellect and will are concreated. The person is individual substance of a nature that is rational. The existence of a person is manifest when the new life is recognized.

There are two sexes, male and female, equal by reason of original creation as persons. Each person is unique and irrepeatable. Each person is either a male or a female as a result of the joining together of genetic material from both male and female.

During cloning there is no joining of genetic material of two parents. The ingredients include two mutilated cells. An ovum without its nucleus is used in order to make room for a somatic nucleus that has been...