ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (AP) — Pope Francis has suggested that women threatened with the Zika virus could use artificial contraception but not abort their fetus, saying there’s a clear moral difference between aborting a fetus and preventing a pregnancy.
Francis was asked Wednesday en route home from Mexico if abortion or birth control could be considered a “lesser evil,” when faced with the Zika-linked cases of rare birth defects such those faced in Brazil, where babies have been born with abnormally small heads.
The explosion of Zika cases has prompted some governments in Latin America to urge women to avoid getting pregnant and has fueled calls from abortion rights groups to loosen the strict anti-abortion laws in the overwhelmingly Catholic region.
Francis excluded abortion absolutely from the debate.
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Well, well. Now this is a huge deviation. Maybe “the church” is signaling a move toward sanctioning contraception.
Well, that does it.
Pat Buchanan, Rick Santorum, and Bill Donohue all claim the Pope isn’t Catholic in 3, 2, 1….
(And a very special question now awaits Catholic convert Jeb Bush.)
This will cause great consternation in the microencephalic -speaking figuratively - right-wing catho crowd.
i was doing some genealogical research the other day, and I cam across some interesting information about the Plague that swept across Europe. The Plague killed so many people that the serfs who survived were able to demand better working conditions, and personal rights and freedoms. The quality of life for the working class is directly related to over/under population. The silver lining of the Zika virus outbreak may be that it becomes “less evil”, morally permissible, and even legal to have birth control programs in place in central and South America. I think the Zika virus also has the potential to affect the abortion debate in the US, but even if it just opens the door to greater acceptance of population control, that has potential to do a lot of good.
Why is the Catholic Church still against artificial methods of birth control? I know they think God said to go forth and populate the world, but that job has been done. All too well probably.
I guess they don’t believe in a living Bible. Apparently, we’re doomed to live under the same laws written over 2000 years ago.