The Moscow Patriarchate submitted for public discussion a draft document called “On the Sanctity of Human Life from the Moment of Conception”, where, in particular, it calls for the rights of a human embryo to be secured in legislation, reports Interfax.
“The Orthodox Church stresses that the fundamental rights of the embryo as a human person should be secured in legislation,” the draft document published on the ROC website states.
The church also calls on the state to guarantee the right of medical workers to refuse to perform an abortion for reasons of Christian conscience.
The authors of the document insist that the embryo is human, which means that it has the right to life.
“Scientific experiments with embryos and their freezing are unacceptable. The fact that for thousands of embryos the possibility of development and life is replaced by experiments and death, undermines human dignity and violates the right to life,” the document says.
Its authors also believe that at the present time there is no “real reason” for using prenatal diagnostics, since the possibility of treating genetic diseases at this early stage still exists only hypothetically, and the negative result obtained during such diagnostics, in most cases leads to abortion.
According to representatives of the Church, abortion is always murder, so it is “impossible to talk about the ‘right to abortion,’ that is, “the right to kill. ”
Meanwhile, the authors of the document specifically discuss such a situation as saving the mother’s life during an ectopic pregnancy, which leads to the inevitable death of the fetus, therefore the woman who terminated the pregnancy in such circumstances is not excluded from the Eucharistic Communion with the Church.
As for the cases when a pregnant woman voluntarily decides to refuse from an abortion at the cost of her own life (for example, in case of diagnosing cancer or a brain tumor), according to the Church, “she is compared to Christian martyrs and passion-bearers, showing an example of holiness.”
The draft document “On the Sanctity of Human Life from the Moment of Conception” was prepared by the Commission of the Inter-Council Presence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Everyone can leave their comments on the document until September 30.
