MANAGUA – The top education official for the Managua Archdiocese has told the press that all those who participated in forcing the nine-year-old girl who was pregnant to have an abortion have excommunicated themselves. Monsignor Silvio Fonseca, said that the parents, the medical staff, and the feminist group, Network of Women Against Violence, which urged the abortion, “are excommunicated 'ipso facto'.”
During his sermon on Sunday, Nicaraguan Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo warned that the abortion clinic staff were “putting themselves at the service of death” in killing the child. The Church had offered to care for the girl and cover medical expenses and take care of her child after birth if she so desired. Obando, the head of the Nicaraguan Bishop's conference said, “It's not that I'm going to excommunicate them, but that (the canonical sentence) falls upon them 'ipso facto.'”
Nicaraguan Bishops Compare Abortion To Terrorist Bombing
The abortion of the 4-month unborn child of the 9-year-old rape victim has sparked a renewed abortion debate in Nicaragua. The country's Roman Catholic bishops compared the violation of the womb, which destroys innocent human life, to a terrorist bomb.
“Is there any difference between a bus full of passengers that receives the impact of a car bomb,” the bishops demanded, “and a metallic instrument that impacts the maternal womb to suck out a fetus?”
The bishops took the occasion to encourage Nicaraguan congressmen not to accept proposals to liberalize abortion laws, which for the moment place restrictions on abortion in many cases. “For the love of Jesus Christ, for the salvation you hope for and for the good of the nation, do not approve abortion under any motive or pretext,” they wrote, or consider “legalizing the abominable crime of abortion even disguised under supposed pseudo-humanitarian extenuating factors such as calling it therapeutic.”
Meanwhile, the government is investigating the abortion. Attorney General Julio Centeno said it may have been a crime under the current law. Health Minister Lucia Salvo has called it “a crime.”
Go to Newsday for more coverage on this story.
(These updates courtesy of LifeSite News.)
