Pope John Paul II gives his blessing during his weekly Angelus prayer at the Vatican

VATICAN CITY, February 2 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Pope John Paul II Sunday, February 2, issued a strong attack against the commercial approach to modern methods of human reproduction and cloning, which he said took advantage of the basic human desire to have children.

"A certain commercial mentality, combined with modern technology can sometimes take advantage of human desires that are good in themselves, like that of becoming mother and father, to push people to have children at any cost," he said.

"In reality, a human life can never be an object. From birth to death, a human being is the subject of inviolable laws, before which freedom should know when to stop," the Pope added during Sunday prayers here, Agence France-Presse (AFP) said.

Speaking from his apartment window to thousands of worshippers gathered on Saint Peter's Square below, the Pope urged governments to adopt clear ethical laws to protect the incalculable value of a human life.

He expressed regret over situations where a human being "becomes the instrument of economic, political and scientific interests, and in particular when the person is weak and cannot defend himself".

French senate backs bans on cloning

On a related issue, the French senate this week adopted a series of draft laws that would ban cloning in almost all cases, including for research, commercial exploitation and medical uses, AFP said.

The measures, passed Wednesday and Thursday, January 29, 30, are in line with French President Jacques Chirac's stated opposition to cloning, which he described last month as contrary to human dignity and criminal.

The draft laws -- which have to be passed by the lower house of parliament and again by the senate to come into effect -- would prohibit the cloning of humans as well as the related technique of creating cloned stem-cell cultures that can be used therapeutically.

The ban on reproductive cloning was drafted to make it a "crime against the human species" with a maximum 30-year prison term and a 7.5-million-euro (eight-million-dollar) fine for violators as well as a special extension of the statute of limitations to 30 years.

Chirac's supporters, who dominate both the senate and the lower chamber, also want to see therapeutic cloning banned.

Their draft law would forbid embryo research -- unless a five-year temporary exception was applied in restricted cases that showed strong medical promise.

Violation in such therapeutic-cloning cases would result in a maximum seven-year sentence and a 100,000-euro fine.

The draft laws also included a proposed Biomedicine Agency that would look into cloning matters, and suggested limiting organ donations meant for transplants just to extended families or de facto spouses.