National Catholic Reporter, April 21, 2006
Italian Cardinal Looks at Embryo Adoption and Condoms
By John Allen
This week's L'espresso magazine carries a fascinating exchange between Dr. Ignazio Marino, an Italian transplant surgeon at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, Penn., and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the former archbishop of Milan and widely considered one of the leading intellectual lights in the church.
On the issue of artificial reproduction, Marino says new technologies are now emerging that would not create and freeze surplus embryos, but ovocites, well before the masculine and feminine strands of chromosomes are combined, and hence before new DNA exists. In other words, what would be created and frozen, Martino argued, would not be a human being.
Martini was cautiously approving.
"It also appears to me that what you propose could overcome the rejection of all forms of artificial reproduction that's present today in a number of circles," he said. "It produces a painful split between a practice that's commonly accepted by most people and approved by law, and the attitude (at least in theory) of many believers."
Martini also supported "embryo adoption," meaning allowing frozen embryos to be implanted in women who volunteer to bring them to term, even if the women are not married, if the alternative is that the embryo will eventually be eliminated.
"The insertion [of the embryo] in the womb of a woman, including a single mother, would seem preferable to its pure and simple destruction," he said.
"Where there is a conflict of values, it seems to me ethically more important to incline to that solution which permits a life to expand, rather than allows it to die," Martini said. "But I understand that not everybody will be of this opinion. I just don't want us to clash on the basis of abstract and general principles, when instead we're in a gray zone where we can't start with apodictic judgments."
On abortion, Martini firmly upheld the moral teaching of the church, but acknowledged the complexity of writing it into public policy.
"It seems to me difficult [to imagine] that, in situations like ours, the state would not distinguish between acts that are punishable in a penal fashion, and acts for which a penal solution doesn't make sense," he said. "That doesn't mean a 'license to kill,' but that the state doesn't intervene in every possible case. Its efforts should be to reduce the number of abortions, to impede them with every means possible (above all after a certain period from the beginning of the pregnancy), to reduce the causes of abortion, and to take precautions so that women who decide to take this step, especially during the period when it's not illegal, do not suffer grave physical damage or have their lives placed at risk."
Martini noted that the risk of serious physical injury is especially grave in the case of clandestine abortions, and hence said that, all things considered, Italy's abortion law -- which permits abortion during the first trimester -- has had the positive effect of "contributing to the reduction and, eventually, elimination" of back-alley procedures.
In a case in which a fetus threatens the life of the mother, Martini said "moral theology has always sustained the principle of legitimate defense and of lesser evil," in order to justify a procedure that would save the life of the mother while terminating the pregnancy.
Similarly, asked about the use of condoms to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS, Martini responded: "Certainly the use of prophylactics can, in some situations, constitute a lesser evil," mentioning the case of a couple where one partner is infected and the other isn't.
The problem, Martini said, isn't really the ethical analysis. The problem is the PR headaches that follow whenever a church official says this out loud. To put it bluntly, anytime a senior church official says that use of a condom might be a "lesser evil" in the context of a deadly disease, the next day's headlines trumpet "Church okay with condoms," which is not the same message.
"The question is really if it's wise for religious authorities to propagandize in favor of this method of defense [from HIV/AIDS], almost implying that other morally sustainable means, including abstinence, are put on a lower level," Martini said. "The principle of a 'lesser evil,' applicable in all the cases covered by ethical doctrine, is one thing; another thing is who ought to express these judgments publicly."