Brazil's president has criticised the Roman Catholic Church for excommunicating doctors who performed an abortion on a nine-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather and was expecting twins.The girl's mother was also excommunicated by Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Archbishop of Recife, the north-eastern city where the family lives. He said that all those involved had "broken God's law".
But the president, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, condemned the excommunication and praised the doctors for their decision to perform the abortion on the girl, who was 15 weeks pregnant. "As a Christian and a Catholic, I deeply regret that a bishop has had such conservative behaviour," he said. "In this case, medicine is more right than the Church."
Archbishop Sobrinho defended his action. Asked why he did not excommunicate the 23-year-old stepfather, he said: "He committed an extremely serious crime. But that crime, according to canon law, is not punished with automatic excommunication.
"Abortion is even more serious. The Church and the whole world condemn the Holocaust that killed six million Jews. What is happening [with abortion] is a silent Holocaust."
The Archbishop was supported by the Vatican. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Congregation for Bishops, told an Italian newspaper abortion was a sin and that the unborn twins were innocent.
Abortion is illegal in Brazil, the world's most populous Catholic country, except in cases of rape or when the mother's life is in danger, both of which applied in this case.
Doctors believed that the nine-year-old, who weighed 5st 10lb, was too small to have twins and that going ahead with the birth would have put her life in danger.
When the abortion was reported in local newspapers, the Church asked a judge to halt the process. He refused so it excommunicated those involved.
Doctors terminate an estimated one million pregnancies in Brazil each year. The poor take home-made drug concoctions or are forced into clandestine clinics, while the better off are treated by qualified doctors known to anyone with money.
That secrecy has a price. More than 200,000 women are treated in public hospitals for complications arising from illegal abortions each year, according to health ministry figures.
One in seven Brazilian women between the age of 15 and 19 is a mother and the average at which women have their first child has fallen to 21 years, from 22.4 years in 1996, according to a government-funded study.
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(Source: TTUK)