The bishops aim to anticipate the debate on abortion in Argentina

For the second time in three years, Argentina, a native of Pope Francis, is discussing the decriminalization of abortion, which the government wants to make "legal, free and safe" in every health center in the country during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. , while hospitals are still grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was a fight that pro-lifers in Argentina knew would come. President Alberto Fernandez had promised to present the bill in March, but had to postpone after the coronavirus crisis forced him to ask the nation he leads to stay home because "the economy can pick up, but a life that it gets lost, it can't. "

In 2018, when then-President Mauricio Macri allowed abortion to be discussed in Congress for the first time in 12 years, many in the pro-abortion camp accused the Catholic Church and Argentine bishops of meddling. On that occasion, the hierarchy issued a handful of statements but many lay people protested for what they perceived as the "silence" of the bishops.

This time, however, the bishops seem determined to be more proactive.

A source close to the bishops told Crux that the Church's intention is to "start" the debate. He specifically chose this verb, which technically does not exist in Spanish, but which was often used by Pope Francis in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium and on other occasions.

Officially translated into English as "take the first step", the verb means not only to take the first step, but to take it before something or someone else. In his exhortation, Francis invited Catholics to be missionaries, to get out of their comfort zones and be evangelizers by looking for those on the periphery.

In the case of Argentina and abortion, the bishops chose to "trigger" Fernandez by intervening before the president officially presented the abortion law. They released a statement on October 22, pointing out the contradiction of making abortion widely available in Argentina as the government continues to ask people to stay home to save their lives.

In that statement, the prelates criticized Fernandez's plans to decriminalize abortion as "unsustainable and inappropriate", both from an ethical point of view and under current circumstances.

To try to prevent criticism from the enemies of abortion, the government has also introduced a bill to give financial help to mothers during the first 1.000 days of the baby's life, a countdown that begins during pregnancy. In general, the maneuver seems to have backfired. It has caused uproar from pro-abortion groups, who see it as a possible way to manipulate women who may want an abortion in order to have the baby; Pro-life groups, meanwhile, consider it ironic: "If a mother wants the baby, then it's a baby ... if not, what is it?" a pro-life NGO tweeted this week.

The president sent the bill to Congress on November 17. In a video she said “it has always been my commitment that the state accompany all pregnant women in their maternity projects and take care of the life and health of those who decide to terminate the pregnancy. The state must not ignore any of these realities “.

The president also said that abortion "takes place" in Argentina but "illegally", increasing the number of women who die each year due to voluntary termination of pregnancy.

Hundreds of experts were heard by the Congress, but only two were clerics: Bishop Gustavo Carrara, auxiliary of Buenos Aires, and Father Jose Maria di Paola, both members of the group of "slum priests", who live and minister in the slums of Buenos Aires.

A pro-life umbrella organization that brings together Catholics, Evangelicals and atheists is organizing a nationwide rally for November 28. There, too, the episcopal conference hopes that the laity will take the initiative. But in the meantime, they will continue to speak through statements, interviews, article editions and on social media.

And the more Fernandez presses to confuse the Church, the more the bishops will respond, a source said. Several observers have acknowledged in recent weeks that Fernandez is pressing to discuss once again that abortion is a distraction from rising unemployment and the fact that more than 60 percent of the country's children live below the poverty line.

Speaking on a radio station about the Church's opposition to the bill on Thursday, Fernandez said: "I am a Catholic, but I need to solve a public health problem."

Without further suggestions, he also said that in the history of the Church there have been different "points of view" on the matter, and stated that "either St. Thomas or St. Augustine said there were two types of abortion, one that deserved a punishment and one who doesn't. And they saw abortions between 90 and 120 days as non-punitive abortions “.

Saint Augustine, who died in 430 AD, distinguished between a fetus before or after "animation," with available science believed to have happened at the end of the first trimester, when most pregnant women begin to hear the baby. move. Yet he defined abortion as a serious evil, even if he could not, in a strictly moral sense, consider it a murder, because the science of the day, based on Aristotelian biology, no.

Thomas Aquinas had a similar thought, speaking of "lustful cruelty", "extravagant methods" of avoiding pregnancy or whether, unsuccessfully, "destroying the semen conceived somehow before birth, preferring to have his offspring perish rather than receive vitality; or if he was advancing to life in the womb, he should be killed before he was born. "

According to Fernandez, “the Church has always evaluated the existence of the soul before the body, and then argued that there was a moment when the mother announced the soul's entry into the fetus, between days 90 and 120, because she felt the movement in her womb, the famous little kicks. "

"I said this a lot to [Cardinal Pietro Parolin], the Secretary of State [of the Vatican] when I visited the Pope in February, and he changed the subject," Fernandez said, before concluding by saying, "The only thing this it shows is that it is a dilemma of the past of a great branch of the Church “.

The list of bishops and priests who have expressed themselves in one way or another on the bill is long, as the list of lay people, organizations such as Catholic universities and conglomerates of lawyers and doctors who have rejected the bill is long and its content repetitive.

Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez of La Plata, often considered one of Pope Francis 'ghost writers and a close ally of the Argentine bishops' conference, summed up the arguments by saying that human rights will never be fully defended if denied to children yet to be. Born.

"Human rights will never be fully defended if we deny them to the children who will be born," he said during a celebration of the Te Deum for the 138th anniversary of the founding of the city of La Plata.

In his homily, Fernandez recalled that Pope Francis "proposes the universal openness of love, which is not so much the relationship with other countries, but the attitude of openness to all, including the different, the last, the forgotten, the abandoned. "

Yet this papal proposal "cannot be understood if the immense dignity of every human person is not recognized, the inviolable dignity of every human person regardless of any circumstance," he said. "The dignity of a human being does not disappear if a person gets sick, if he becomes weak, if he gets old, if he is poor, if he is disabled or even if he has committed a crime".

He then said that "among those rejected by a society that discriminates, excludes and forgets there are unborn children".

“The fact that they have not yet fully developed does not detract from their human dignity. For this reason, human rights will never be fully defended if we deny them to unborn children, ”the archbishop said.

President Fernandez and the pro-abortion campaign argue it would be a solution for women who live in poverty and cannot afford to have an abortion in a private clinic. However, a group of mothers from the slums of Buenos Aires wrote a letter to Francis, asking for him to help their voice.

A group of slum mothers, who in 2018 formed a "network of networks" in working-class neighborhoods to defend life, wrote to Pope Francis ahead of a new debate on abortion and some sector's attempt to generalize that this practice it is an option for poor women.

In the letter to the pontiff, they stressed that they represent a network of "women who work side by side to take care of the lives of many neighbors: the baby who is gestating and his mother as well as the one who was born is among us and needs Help. "

“This week, hearing the President of the Nation present his bill seeking to legalize abortion, a cold terror has invaded us at the very thought that this project is aimed at teenagers in our neighborhoods. Not so much because the slum culture thinks of abortion as a solution to an unexpected pregnancy (His Holiness is well aware of our way of assuming motherhood among aunts, grandmothers and neighbors), but because it aims to cultivate the idea that abortion is one more chance within the range of contraceptive methods and that the main users [of abortion] must also be poor women, ”they said.

"We have been living this new stereotype every day since 2018 in medical care centers installed in our neighborhoods," they wrote, nothing that when they go to a doctor in a state-owned clinic, they hear things like: "How are you going to raise another child? In your situation it is irresponsible to give birth to another child "or" abortion is a right, no one can force you to be a mother ".

"We think with horror that if this happens in small clinics and hospitals in Buenos Aires without an abortion law, what will happen with the proposed bill, which grants 13-year-old girls unrestricted access to this horrendous practice?" the women wrote.

“Our voice, like that of unborn children, is never heard. They classified us as a "poor man's factory"; "State workers". Our reality as women who overcome the challenges of life with our children is overshadowed ”by women who claim to“ represent us without our consent, stifling our true positions on the right to life. They don't want to listen to us, neither the legislators nor the journalists. If we did not have slum priests raising their voices for us, we would be even more alone, ”they admitted.