A 9-year-old girl who was carrying twins, and whose stepfather is suspected of raping her, underwent an abortion on Wednesday despite complaints from Brazil’s Roman Catholic Church. The stepfather has been jailed since last week, the police said. Abortion is illegal in Brazil, the country with the most Roman Catholics, but judges can make exceptions if the mother’s life is in danger or the fetus has no chance of survival. Fatima Maia, director of the public university hospital where the abortion was performed, said the pregnancy, which was in its 15th week, posed a serious risk to the girl, who weighs 80 pounds. But Marcio Miranda, a lawyer for the Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife in northeastern Brazil, said the girl should have carried the twins to term and had a Caesarean section. “It’s the law of God: Do not kill,” he said in comments reported by the newspaper O Globo.
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First the Church tried to intervene and force the 9-year-old to carry the pregnancy to term. Now the Church has excommunicated everyone involved, including the child's mother and doctors.
Can you imagine the mental anguish these religious leaders are inflicting on this poor little girl? "Gee mommy, I'm sorry step daddy raped me, forced an abortion to save my life, and made me get you kicked out of church!"
I mean, rarely are abortion cases as cut and dry as this one. And yet, the Catholic Church has sided with Evil. So much for the moral high ground.
1 comments:
+1 proof why "nothing in excess, everything in moderation" rings true once again. This is what happens when you plug something as an Ultimate Truth: you're bound to get burned by the exceptions. The sooner the Church allows for abortions under the rarest and most obvious of circumstances (the same way it allows for annulments of marriages or allows for killing in self-defense) the better. I thought they already did do this, in fact, but I guess I thought wrong. :\ Either that or Brazilian Catholic leaders are overzealous.
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