Gozo Bishop Mario Grech has entered the debate on assisted procreation, warning that not everything that can be done in a laboratory is morally correct.

Furthermore, there was no guarantee that what was permitted by Civil Law was ethically correct either.

He made his comments while delivering homily at the church of the Franciscan Minors in Victoria.

Mgr Grech said that in modern society, it was not just finances and jobs which were being threatened, but even human life. On the horizon one sometimes saw clouds which could well cause a flood that would overwhelm the moral and legal safeguards which existed so far to protect human life.

There were, in Maltese society, some people who only approved only what was needed now, without consideration of whether what was considered as being useful was ethically and legally possible.

What was done in a laboratory was not necessarily ethically correct. What Civil Law might allow might also not be ethically right, even though, for Civil Law to be just it could not go against the natural moral order.

Mgr Grech said science helped married couples who had problems to procreate. But science could also lead to the conception of human life out of wedlock. Life should be the fruit of love between the married couple and should only be conceived in the context of conjugal love.

Although Malta had not legalised abortion, there still was an abortion mentality, Mgr Grech warned. It was not impossible to think that in Malta, people who were supposed to be there to defend life, also proposed abortion. It was also a known fact that in assisted procreation in labs, there was a major risk of the the destruction of human life when life was stored in freezers.

Furthermore, life could be manipulated and destroyed not only during conception, and during pregnancy, but even when people were seriously ill and one had to decide, for himself or for others, what action to take.

Euthanasia, Mgr Grech said, was murder and could never be morally acceptable.