Abstract

In the United States in particular, one institution that consistently resisted the social momentum to implement eugenic public policies was the Catholic Church. From the Catholic perspective, everyone is worthy, and the focus should be on figuring out how best to care for each individual human being, with access to scarce resources given first to those who need them the most. This chapter addresses the ethical challenge of eugenics and genetic technologies, including preconception and pre-natal genetic testing and genome editing, from the perspective of the medical moral tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. This perspective can contribute to a broad and rich description of human nature and experience, including many types of knowledge and experience, because genetic interventions can and will affect human beings on all levels of their existence.