c. 1998 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ In the United States, Dr. Marian Damewood said,”I am considered a conservative.” Not here. To many defenders of current Catholic teachings, the Baltimore obstetrician and gynecologist who administers in vitro fertilization to desperate couples wanting children, might as well be practicing witchcraft.”Any other method than natural fertility regulation is totally inappropriate to the dignity of the human person,”said John Billings, a prominent Australian obstetrician and church adviser.

But Damewood, an associate professor at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, said she feels no conflict as a Catholic and a clinician who uses methods condemned by Pope John Paul II.”I don’t feel that I have a major difference with the church but a different perspective,”she said.”My goal is to create life. So is theirs.” The two physicians were among a few dozen health care professionals assembled here recently by the bioethics institutes of Rome’s Catholic University and Georgetown University in Washington to discuss women’s health issues. Illness prevention and improved daily services for the world’s poor were among topics hashed out.

But the most arresting areas were the ethical questions posed by fertility methods and the prospect of human cloning.

The church has laid down the law on both areas. Fertility regulation is permitted only using natural means, like the rhythm method and abstinence. Anything beyond the conjugal act to produce offspring is prohibited. Human cloning is out of the question, the church says.

But even the church’s defenders of the faith _ not to mention Catholics who say they defend the faith by disobeying it _ are not completely in step on the acceptable medical practices and scientific methods.

Moreover, emerging questions about fertility and cloning test even the Catholic Church’s consistency.

The contrast was visible last week, when the Vatican condemned and others praised the birth to a California couple of a child from an embryo frozen for nearly eight years.

The 9-pound boy was born to parents who underwent fertility treatments in 1990. After giving birth to a child the same year, the couple froze a second in vitro embryo, where it sat until last year, when they decided to have a second child.”Every human being has the right to be conceived in a human way … and carried in his mother’s womb,”the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano wrote.

But for Damewood and other practitioners of in vitro fertilization, nothing could be more”human”than helping a struggling couple use their own biological materials to bear children.

Speaking on Tuesday (Feb. 24) to a separate group of scientists working on a genome project, the pope cautioned against using a person’s genetic code to satisfy an urge to abort an unwanted or malformed fetus.

Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, director of the Institute of Bioethics at Catholic University in Rome, acknowledged the difficulty of opposing a method like in vitro fertilization, which does, after all, promote life.”As for bioethics of conjugal love and in vitro fertilization,”he said,”both cases are interested in promoting life. The difference is there is not full convergence on methods, and this is no small matter. The church believes you cannot substitute the conjugal nature of conception.” The Catholic Church teaches that life begins at conception, or when an egg is fertilized and becomes an organism.

Sgreccia and other opponents of in vitro fertilization contend that despite its claim of creating life, the procedure will increasingly destroy life by creating more embryos than can be used and eventually discarding the unwanted ones.

Most, if not all, reproduction facilities in the United States observe a voluntary moratorium on human embryo research and do not discard old embryos.

Physicians concede there will come a time when remedies, like embryo adoption, will have to be employed to address the expanding reservoir of frozen embryos.

While Catholics are split over the practice of in vitro fertilization, though, no such divide characterizes human cloning, which most Catholics _ and most people _ deplore.

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But the church has yet to chart a consistent course on the cloning, or replication, of cells and tissues, which medical professionals say could unlock the mysteries of certain genetic diseases, cancers, spinal cord injuries and infertility.

Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore recently told a congressional subcommittee that any kind of cloning is an affront to Catholic teaching. “To claim one is banning `human cloning’ by simply banning the nurture or live birth of human embryos already produced by cloning is to distort language and common sense,”he said.

Edmund Pellegrino, a Catholic and professor of medicine and ethics at Georgetown’s bioethics center, disagreed.

Pellegrino said he ardently defends the church’s views on reproduction but said Catholic opponents of cell replication are off course.”Certain cloning techniques are legitimate _ cells, for example, that offer useful therapeutic knowledge,”he said.

Pellegrino said even church leaders are not in agreement over the ethics of such replication, and might otherwise support the research if not for the fear it could lead to human cloning.

But, he said,”there’s not necessarily a slippery slope as long as you know your boundaries. The act itself of replicating cells isn’t intrinsically wrong.”

DEA END HEILBRONNER