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On March 6, news reports filtered from Rio de Janeiro that an 80-pound, 9-year old girl, pregnant with twins, the result of a rape by her stepfather, underwent an abortion. (http://news.aol.com/article/9-year-old-girl-abortion/369661)Brazil has more Roman Catholics than any other country, and in that country, there are only two circumstances in which an abortion is NOT illegal; the health of the mother demands it, and the fetus has no medical chance to survive. Neither rape nor incest is among the reasons the procedure would not be prosecutable as a crime. In this instance, medical authorities asserted the young girl would have been at physical risk, should the pregnancy be carried to full term.
According to Fatima Maia, the director of the university where the abortion took place, “[The young girl] is very small. Her uterus doesn’t have the ability to hold one, let alone two children.”
That medical rationale posed, the lawyer for the Archdiocese of Olinda and Cecife, said the little girl should have carried the twins to term, and had a cesarean section. “It’s the law of God,” Ms. Miranda, the attorney claimed. “Do not kill. We consider this murder.”
Point of fact: an archdiocese speaks for Rome, for the Pope. If and when it does not, Rome speaks to countermand that which proceeds from the archdiocese. The only conclusion available in this instance is that the position taken by the archdiocese reflects in every way that of the Church.
The question I have for any and all Roman Catholics is actually several I’d like someone to respond to: essentially, somehow explain and defend the Church. Those are two. As much, even more, I want to know how anyone who is composed of the least particle of human empathy and moral fiber can remain a member of an institution I regard as supremely diabolical. A 9-year-old girl! Raped! By her stepfather! A girl who has suffered the grotesque trauma of a brutal assault on her body and on her mind, and who will probably carry those emotional scars her entire life! And the Church just doesn’t care? About the girl, or her life? “Tough, dogma is dogmatic, and not permitted is the first whiff of an exception”?
It’s not a guess, it’s an etched in stone conclusion — I just do not get it: How any sentient being can be so bereft of a moral and human foundation that he or she might ever excuse the Church’s manifestly long train of inhumanity, its despicable history of countless deprecations; repeated crusades that murdered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, Inquisitions and the most gruesome torture of scientists and of tens of thousands of native peoples in Northern Africa, Western and Eastern Europe, and in the New World, the very active promotion of anti-Semitism to the point of ignoring the travesties of Nazi Germany, the earnest quest to shove under the rug the sexual predations of young boys by its priests and bishops . . . And now this?
Please, anyone.
