Bishops rule out abortion during Zika crisis

Couples in the Archdiocese of São Paulo have been told by their cardinal that it is their “personal choice” to determine whether to use contraception during the current outbreak of the Zika virus.

“Who am I to teach couples how to plan a pregnancy?” Cardinal Odilo Scherer said in an interview with BBC Brasil during a programme looking into whether the virus is responsible for foetal abnormalities.

The cardinal explained that unborn children have the right to life, which rules out abortion, Mothers who give birth to babies with microcephaly, he said, have “a mission” to care for them and the right to receive all necessary support.

The United Nations has recommended that women in countries affected by Zika should be given access to abortion.

Eight hundred cases of Zika have been reported the city of Ribeirão Preto, more than 1,500 miles from the centre of the outbreak in the north-east of Brazil. There is evidence of a link between infection with the Zika virus RNA and instances of microcephaly – babies born with abnormally small heads – though it is not conclusive.

Brazil’s Bishops’ Conference has yet to respond to the question of whether it would be legitimate to use contraceptives to avoid a pregnancy in a situation of risk. However, the conference, like Cardinal Scherer, maintains that abortion is not justified in cases of microcephaly.

In a statement issued last week the bishops urged Brazil’s Government to ensure a “high-quality universal system of public health” and described the state of environmental health in the country as “shameful”. Parishes, they went on, should push for government action and use Masses and other events to provide accurate information about the problem.

Meanwhile in Colombia, bishops have also come out strongly against offering women abortions if microcephaly is detected.

“The priority should be the elimination of the mosquitoes, not the lives of innocent children,” Fr Pedro Mercado, assistant secretary of Colombia’s Bishops’ Conference told El Tiempo newspaper. The director of the Bishops’ Conference office for the defence of life, Dr Daniela Cardona, said she was surprised population control measures were being used to try to prevent Zika.

“We do not understand the logic of preventing women from claiming their right to motherhood or driving people to have abortions through fear and lack of information,” she wrote on the conference’s website.

In Honduras Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez condemned “therapeutic” abortions for women infected with Zika. “It made me really sad to read a medical professional writing about therapeutic abortion because therapeutic abortion does not exist,” he said during Mass last week.