NML

• Aquinas’ natural moral law would reject both embryo research and cloning, since they abandon the usual methods of procreation through loving sexual relationships.

  · Aquinas would see them as a failure to worship God, who is the creator of life.

  · They would also violate a third primary precept, namely the requirement to live in an ordered society: ‘scientific’ reproduction could lead to the breakdown of the marriage relationship
• The Catholic Church rejects such procedures


  For the same kind of reasons
• Biblical texts that support natural moral law's rejection of such procedures

  • Job 31:15
  • Jeremiah 1:5
• Job 31:15: 'Which refers to the belief that God fashions each person in the womb'
• Jeremiah 1:5: 'Where (during God's call to Jeremiah to be a prophet) God tells Jeremiah: 'Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.''
• The genetic blueprint of a human is present at the moment of conception, so biologically, a human becomes an individual person at that point
• Double Effect


  The argument that stem cell research / therapeutic cloning has the potential to cure all types of human diseases does not pass the law of double effect, since it is not permitted to do a bad act to achieve a good result.
• Natural Moral Law would also be against designer babies. Human life is created imago Dei – ‘in the image of God’ (Genesis 1:26–27), so human reproduction is not something to be tampered with.

  · To design babies so that the image of the human race is eventually changed into a trans-human state seems to go against God’s intentions: the ‘image’ of God would no longer be seen in the human form.

  · The production of designer babies would violate the primary precept of living in an ordered society, since it would lead to an even greater gap between the rich and the poor.