* Regarding "Biotechnology: With new document, Vatican extends pro-life agenda" (NCR, Dec. 26): The Vatican's new directives in Dignitas Personae should be read alongside The New York Times Magazine article of Nov. 30 by Alex Kuczynski titled "Her Body, My Baby" on Stainless Steel Earrings her experience of infertility and employing a surrogate mother. Although I resonated with her joy at the birth of her healthy child, the account is credibly unsparing in describing the exorbitant costs and the emotional ambiguity in watching another woman carry one's child, for a fee, with her own children and family looking on. I have many reservations about the embryology, theology, notions of human sexuality and pastoral practice of this new document, but can nevertheless resonate with the caution it advocates as this non-brave new genetic world is explored. I wrote my own thesis in moral theology in 1973 on "The morality of amniocentesis and responsible genetic parenthood." I think of my naivete and shudder.
DAVID PASINSKI
Fayetteville, N.Y.
* With Dignitas Personae, it is obvious that Rome is just trying to up the ante in its antiabortion stance by claiming that the person is present from the moment of conception. This flies in the face of two clear, official statements to the contrary, documented by a noted church historian.
"The catechism of the Council of Trent holds that through miraculous intervention the human soul was joined to the matter from the first instance in the case of Jesus. Nobody can doubt that this was something new and an admirable work of the Holy Spirit, since in the natural order nobody can be informed by a human soul except after the prescribed space of time." And: "The Holy Office declared in 1713 that a fetus can be baptized 'if there is reasonable foundation for admitting that the fetus is animated by a rational soul. If, however, there is no reasonable foundation, it may by no means be baptized.' " The quotations are from The Future Church of 140 B.C.E.: A Hidden Revolution, by Bernard Lee.
embroidered patches
(Br.) FINBAR McMULLEN, FSC
Winona, Minn.
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