A Vatican official has said the Catholic church will excommunicate a medical team who performed Colombia's first legal abortion on an 11-year-old girl, who was eight weeks pregnant after being raped by her stepfather.
Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, said in addition to the doctors and nurses, the measure could apply to "relatives, politicians and lawmakers" whom he called "protagonists in this abominable crime."
The girl, whose identity has not been released, had "fallen in the hands of evildoers," the cardinal said in an interview with local television on Tuesday.
In May, Colombia's constitutional court partially lifted the ban on abortion in this deeply Catholic country, allowing pregnancies to be terminated in cases of severe deformity of the foetus, when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or when the mother's life is in danger.
The first test of the ruling came when the girl sought to terminate her pregnancy, which followed her being raped by her stepfather. The man admitted to the abuse, which began when the child was seven.
When the case became public, doctors were wary of performing the abortion as the text of the court's ruling has yet to be published and they feared prosecution. But the high court issued a new ruling, compelling doctors to abide by its decision if the woman's case fell within the criteria.
Once the ruling was handed down, the girl's pregnancy was terminated at a public hospital in Bogota. Carlos Lemus, the director of Simon Bolivar hospital where the abortion was performed, said he respected the church's decision but did not share its view.
"We acted within the constitutional framework," Lemus said. "We were faced with the petition of a girl who wanted to go back to playing with her toys."
He said Cardinal Trujillo "calls the doctors and nurses `evildoers.' I think the person who raped her is the evildoer."
"The Vatican has the right to excommunicate whomever they choose. But I would hope that they also excommunicate priests when they rape boys or girls," Senator Gina Parody, said.
The president of Colombia's ecclesiastic tribunal, Monsignor Libardo Ramirez, said according to canonical law excommunication was applied to anyone who participated in the "murder of a child in the womb."
But he added that it would be up to Cardinal Rubiano Saenz, as the leading figure of the Roman Catholic church in Colombia, to decide whether to formally apply the sanctions and to whom.
Health authorities estimate that more than 300,000 clandestine abortions are carried out each year in the country. Illegal abortion is punishable by up to three years in prison for women who terminate their pregnancies and for doctors who perform the procedure.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS