Lille University Opts to Keep In-Vitro Work

The Catholic University of Lille, despite a Vatican ban on in-vitro fertilization, has said it will continue the test-tube baby program, calling it “an infinitely precious human service.”

The university said in a statement issued this week that it has a responsibility to the scientific, medical and bioethical community and that the institution’s credibility “requires openness, academic freedom and the pursuit of high-quality research.”

The statement also said its medical school staff is “convinced in their consciences that they not only are not doing illicit work but that they are offering to the couples involved an infinitely precious human service.”

Officials of the medical school, in interviews and in a commentary written for the newspaper Le Monde last week by Charles Lefevre, a priest and professor of medical ethics at Lille, had indicated their opposition to the Vatican position on in-vitro fertilization.

The Vatican issued a document on March 10 denouncing practices such as the freezing of embryos, genetic manipulation and cloning. It also condemned any laboratory experiments involving human embryos.

In its statement, the Catholic University of Lille asked the Sacred Congregation “to open a dialogue on this particular question with us and the other Catholic universities concerned.”

It said putting the new ruling into effect immediately “would pose grave moral problems” for the Roman Catholic university because of the many couples already in the program who hope to have babies through in-vitro fertilization.