Surrogate Motherhood, Test-Tube Babies Opposed : Church Procreation View Urged on Italy

The Italian Bishops’ Conference urged Italian lawmakers to heed the Vatican’s opposition to surrogate motherhood, test-tube babies and other methods of procreation that it deems artificial.

“The gravity of problems related to new biomedical techniques is one more reason to rethink and reformulate, with wisdom and courage, a legal order conforming to the needs of moral law,” the bishops said in a statement Wednesday.

Some politicians, however, said the Roman Catholic Church should not seek to impose its views on the nation.

There was a wide range of reaction in this overwhelmingly Catholic nation to the document on procreation issued by the Vatican on Tuesday, which also condemned cloning and experiments on living embryos. The document left the door open to research on helping sterile couples conceive, but said technology should not treat the human body as “a mere complex of tissues” and embryos as “disposable biological material.”

It asked governments to forbid sperm and embryo banks and surrogate motherhood.

Addressing themselves to scientists and doctors, the Italian bishops said the church is “not against basic research nor technological applications” but they should be aware of “ethical questions if they want to serve man and his good.”

Their statement urged couples who cannot bear children to “have faith in science and medicine . . . without offending the dignity of the person and the right to life of every living being.”

The church has unsuccessfully sought to overturn Italy’s liberal abortion law, which was upheld in a 1981 referendum.

The Communists, Italy’s second largest political party, said, “It is fully legitimate for the church to give its opinion, but it would be very serious if it wants to impose its position on the Legislature.”

Guglielmo Castagnetti, a Republican Party lawmaker, said the document “sounds like a further confirmation of the progressive distancing of Catholic dogma and the evolution of science, custom and the needs of contemporary man,”

But Christian Democrat deputy Calogero Pumilia said, “Life remains a gift that can only be the fruit of love.”

Luigi Laratta, president of the family planning organization AIED, said the Vatican document “is surprising, not so much because it goes in a direction contrary to the development of science but because it is lacking in humanity.”

He said 70% of artificial insemination cases in Italy are done on practicing Catholic women.

Carlo Flamini, a leading gynecologist and professor at the University of Bologna, said, “The document doesn’t interest me, and in any case, it is cold, bureaucratic and rather inhumane regarding those who want children but are unable to have them.”

“It would be unthinkable to halt scientific progress,” said Carlo Vizzini, a Social Democrat Cabinet member.