Pope Francis has strongly criticized mercy killing, abortion, in vitro fertilization and stem cell research.
The pontiff decried the secondary naming of euthanasia as “mercy killing”, saying anyone who thought it so had a “false sense of compassion.”
Earlier this month, the Vatican’s top bioethics official condemned as “reprehensible” the death by assisted suicide of a 29-year-old American woman, Brittany Maynard, who was suffering terminal brain cancer and said she wanted to die with dignity.
“This woman (took her own life) thinking she would die with dignity, but this is the error,” said Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, the head of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
“Suicide is … a bad thing because it is saying no to life and to everything it means with respect to our mission in the world and towards those around us,” he said, describing assisted suicide as “an absurdity”.
The Pope also condemned in vitro fertilization, describing it as “the scientific production of a child” and embryonic stem cell research, which he said amounted to “using human beings as laboratory experiments to presumably save others.”
“This is playing with life,” he said. “Beware, because this is a sin against the creator, against God the creator.”
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