"Life must always be protected."
Except if that life happens to be a pregnant girl, a pregnant nine year old girl, a pregnant nine year old girl carrying twins, a pregnant nine year old girl that will probably die if she carries the twins to term, a pregnant nine year old girl that will probably die if she carries the twins to term who was raped by her father.
A nine year old girl in Brazil was raped by, by some accounts perhaps since she was six years old, and was impregnated by her father. The girl recently underwent an abortion to terminate the pregnancy, and the Catholic Church has expressed outrage over the incident; not that the girl was raped but that she had an abortion.
According to an article in the New York Times the director of the public university hospital where the abortion was performed said that the pregnancy was in its fifteenth week, and the girl faced a serious health risks weighing only 80 pounds. According to the same article the lawyer for the Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife in northeastern Brazil said that the girl should have carried the twins to term and had a Caesarean section.
"Life must always be protected" is how according to the Belfast Telegraph a senior Vatican cleric has defended the Catholic Church's decision to excommunicate the mother and doctors of a nine-year-old rape victim who had the life-saving abortion.
If it was not outrageous enough that the Catholic Church would excommunicate those that saved the girls life, the Catholic Church has not decided to excommunicate the father. From the same Belfast Telegraph article:
Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the conservative regional archbishop for Pernambuco where the girl was rushed to hospital, has said that the man would not be thrown out of the Church, because although he had allegedly committed "a heinous crime", the Church took the view that "the abortion, the elimination of an innocent life, was more serious".
Despite the Catholic Church having the foresight to be against the War in Iraq, and to contribute enormously to the cause of ending poverty, the Catholic Church has completely lost their moral bearings. It is exactly this type of intolerant stance that may actually push people away from Catholicism. This also illustrates how dangerous religion can be when it stands in the way of medicine and science.
In Brazil despite that abortion is illegal it is still common, especially among the poor. According to an article in Time an estimated 1 million women in Brazil have an abortion each year. The "poor are forced into clandestine clinics or take medication, while the better-off are treated by qualified physicians at well-appointed surgeries known to anyone with money and overlooked by colluding authorities."
More than 200,000 women are treated in Brazilian hospitals every year for complications related to illegal abortions, one in three pregnancies in Brazil are unwanted, and one in seven women between the ages of 15 and 19 is a mother. However, the Catholic Church continues to ignore the realities. Like the anti-choice movement in the United States the Catholic Church in Brazil is more interested in protecting dogma than life.
Political and social thought...
to the Left of College Station