you may have seen the tragic headlines this week about a 9-year-old girl in brazil who was given an abortion because she was raped by her step-father and became pregnant with twins. weighing in at only 80 lbs., the doctors concluded that to continue the pregnancy would've put the life of this young girl at serious risk and hence performed the abortion. the article explains that:
Abortion is illegal in Brazil, which has more Catholics than any other nation, but exceptions are allowed in cases of rape and when the mother's life would be endangered by giving birth....
The Catholic Church's archbishop for the area criticized the decision as against "the law of God" and excommunicated her mother, the doctors and other people involved in the abortion...
"The law of God is above any human law," Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the archbishop of Olinda and Recife, said..."I believe the position of the church is extreme, radical and inadequate," Health Minister Jose Gomes Temporao said on a government radio program.
"I am shocked by the radical position of this religion which, wrongly saying it is defending a life, puts another life in danger that is as important as any other."
later reports have confirmed that the vatican has upheld and defended the bishop's ruling of excommunication for those involved. now, i give serious props to the brazilian public for their strict abortion laws. also, kudos is in order for the catholic church which has held an unequivocal stance against abortion and homosexuality as sin, despite the ever-increasing unpopularity of those positions, even when many protestant denominations are willing to pander to popular opinion. however, this case certainly begs the question: "should the right to life lead to death?"
now, i'm not a brazilian doctor and i was not part of the medical conclusions, but assuming the facts are accurate, the point of the health minster is valid: are we willing to protect one innocent life at the cost of another? no matter what way you look at it, the whole situation is a sickening tragedy. but though the refusal of the catholic church to kowtow to moral relativism and the preeminence given to God's law over man's is commendable, one gets the feeling that they may be applying the letter of the law but missing the spirit thereof: namely, to protect innocent life. thoughts? comments? (and since this topic is a "flash-point", remember to keep the comments respectful... inappropriate comments will be deleted. ;)
5 comments:
I am going to cop out on this one and just say that I can't believe abortion is illegal in Brazil! That is hard to imagine in this day and age.
welcome to the site, jake. it seems odd to americans that abortion could be all but illegal anywhere because the media often paints the already fairly loose abortion laws of the US as far too "conservative" when they are really nothing of the sort. america's abortion laws are some of the most lax on the planet (along with some communist and post-communist states) check out the map and table of int'l abortion laws at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_Laws
and you'll see there's acutally MANY countries where abortion is much more strictly regulated and limited than in the US.
Is there a Solomon in the house?!? What would the wisest man in the world have said?
What you have here is a case of one very guilty adult and three very innocent children - the step daughter and what would have been her 2 children that are no more and so have no voice, no chance of seeing the light of day, and no hope of redeeming their wretched beginnings.
The Bible says that God's ways are not are ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. I don't think that God thinks of this at all in the way that we do. God hates injustice and oppression...He also forbids and condemns the taking of innocent life - "Thou shalt not kill".
Who among us can measure the injustice of a 9 year old raped by a family member or the aborting of two innocent fetuses who did nothing to offend anyone in the world? The rape was wrong - does murder make it better or take away the suffering the poor girl had already experienced? It seems the family and doctors removed any possibility of God redeeming the situation when they took the judgment of life and death into their own hands and ordered the unborn to die.
Knowing what Scripture declares about the sanctity of life - that it is God who forms life in the womb, that He fashions us from our inception, that He knows us before we see the light of day, wouldn't the choosing of life have been better for all concerned?
Assuming the girl survived the development of the babies within her and the birth, couldn't these children have ended up being a blessing to her as time passed? Or couldn't these lives have turned a horrible situation into something of value if they were given a chance to see life?
I will never understand how the killing of the innocent unborn redeems anything! It's not a question of a life for a life - or whose life holds more value - it's a question of letting God be God and giving Him an opportunity to act.
thanks, anonymous, for your input. i totally agree with you and don't think that killing an innocent, unborn child will somehow make the pain and horror of rape any less (and probably much more). i've know of some cases where women who were believers had been raped and became pregnant, but chose to keep the baby. later that child became precious to them and a great "redemption" of the situation, as you said.
the huge difference in this case is that the twins were not aborted because of the fact that they were conceived by rape (awful as that fact is). the abortion was performed (if the sources are to be believed and we have no grounds to doubt them) because the 9-year-old mother would have died other wise. now, whereas an adult mother, impregnanted willingly by her husband let's say, may chose to die to bring her child into the world, certainly no one can demand that of a 9-yr-old rape victim. and supposedly her death was not just possible but unavoidable. so, that makes this situation much different than just a rape case. you're right, the baby shouldn't have to die for the sins of its father. that is not justice but cruel vengeance. however, we're talking here about saving innocent life at the cost of another.
the question still remains in my mind whether the babies could have been allowed to grow and then taken out at some early-ish point before they put mom at risk but yet would have been able to grow to full blown babies in incubation, etc. If so, that certainly would have solved the heart wrenching situation.
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