Dignitas Personae

Background and Occasion

In the two decades after Donum Vitae (1987), biomedical technology advanced rapidly. Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) became routine; hundreds of thousands of embryos were held in frozen storage; preimplantation diagnosis made it possible to select embryos; the cloning of Dolly the sheep (1996) and the isolation of human embryonic stem cells (1998) opened new prospects and debates. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal William Levada, prepared an instruction to address these developments.

Dignitas Personae is dated 8 September 2008, the feast of the Nativity of Mary, and was published on 12 December 2008. Benedict XVI approved it and ordered its publication. It has the character of a doctrinal instruction, and the Congregation states that it should be received with the religious assent the faithful owe to the Magisterium.

Structure

After an introduction, the instruction has three parts: Anthropological, theological and ethical aspects of human life and procreation; New problems concerning procreation; and New treatments which involve the manipulation of the embryo or the human genetic patrimony.

Central Teaching

The fundamental principle

The instruction restates the principle at its foundation: the dignity of a person must be recognised in every human being from conception to natural death. The human embryo has from the beginning the dignity proper to a person. The instruction also restates the teaching that the origin of human life has its authentic context in marriage and the family, where it is generated through an act that expresses the reciprocal love of a man and a woman. Faith confirms and deepens these truths, which reason can grasp, by revealing that each person is called to be a child of God.

New problems concerning procreation

The second part applies these principles to reproductive techniques.

• Treatments for infertility are licit when they respect the right to life of every human being from conception, the unity of marriage, and the specifically human values of sexuality. Techniques that assist the conjugal act or remove obstacles to fertility are encouraged, and the instruction commends adoption.
• IVF is reaffirmed as illicit, and the instruction draws attention to the vast number of embryos sacrificed in its practice, many of which are discarded or destroyed.
• ICSI is judged in the same way as IVF, since it too separates procreation from the conjugal act.
• The freezing of embryos is incompatible with the respect due to them. The instruction acknowledges that there is no morally acceptable solution for the frozen embryos that already exist. It explains that using them for research or treatment is unacceptable, and that proposals of “prenatal adoption”, although praiseworthy in intention, present problems similar to those already mentioned.
• The freezing of oocytes for IVF is morally unacceptable.
• Embryo reduction, the selective destruction of embryos in the womb, is intentional abortion.
• Preimplantation diagnosis, aimed at selecting embryos, is an expression of a eugenic mentality.
• New forms of interception and contragestation, means that prevent the implantation of an embryo or eliminate it soon after, fall within the sin of abortion when used with that intention.

Genetic and embryonic treatments

The third part treats new therapies.

• Gene therapy on somatic cells is in principle morally licit when it aims to heal. Germ line cell therapy, whose effects would pass to offspring, is not morally permissible in its present state, because of the risks involved.
• The idea of using genetic engineering for eugenic enhancement is rejected.
• Human cloning, whether reproductive or “therapeutic”, is intrinsically illicit.
• Stem cells: research using adult or umbilical cord stem cells, or other methods that do not harm human life, is licit and should be encouraged. Obtaining stem cells from living human embryos, which destroys them, is gravely illicit.
• Attempts at hybrid cloning using animal oocytes and human nuclei offend human dignity.
• Use of biological material of illicit origin: researchers have a duty to avoid using material obtained from abortions or the destruction of embryos. However, grave reasons, such as danger to the health of children, may justify parents in using a vaccine developed from such material, while they voice their disagreement and ask for alternatives.

Theological Significance

Dignitas Personae shows how the Church’s moral teaching applies stable principles to changing technology. It adds no new principles to Donum Vitae but extends its reasoning to new cases, and it distinguishes carefully between techniques that are wrong in themselves and questions of cooperation with evil in the use of their products. Its treatment of vaccines became an important reference in later debates, including those during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The instruction also reflects the moral method of Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae: certain acts, such as the direct destruction of an innocent human being, are intrinsically evil, while others call for prudent judgement about circumstances and consequences.

For readers of this site, the instruction is the most detailed magisterial document on bioethics, and it belongs with Donum Vitae and Evangelium Vitae in the moral theology tract.