In these early days of the new year, unfortunately, bad news comes on the life front: the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, taking up the protests of some feminist associations, has essentially erased the fundamental right to conscientious objection against abortion, introducing an amendment to Art. 24 Paragraph 10 of the Organic Law, currently regulating the matter. This is, sadly, yet another sad example of a judiciary, which, by blows of ideological rulings, effectively dismantles the rule of law and carries out revolutionary legislative action, improperly replacing Parliament.
As usual, an extreme case was used in Ecuador to introduce the practice: therefore, if a patient is in remote, distant and difficult to access areas, the doctor who cites conscientious objection, in case he turns out to be the only one who can perform the abortion procedure, is forced to perform it “With due diligence and without delay” as the sentence reads, whether he likes it or not, crushing his own conscience. The court also eliminated the requirement for minors to present a consent from their legal representative in order to have an abortion. Once the exception is introduced, the levee is broken and the special case becomes the rule, moreover particularly odious in this case because it forces the health care provider to perform acts contrary to his or her beliefs, values and faith.
However, bad news is also coming from Spain, where figures for the number of abortions performed in 2021 have just been released. There has been a disturbing increase: 21.1 percent of conceived children, or more than one in five, are killed in the womb, almost half a percentage point more (0.44 percent, to be precise) than in 2020. The massacre of the innocents claimed a total of 90,189 lives. In 2020 there were 88,269.
The reasons, dramatically, are mostly either futile or eugenic: even taking the official data at face value, only 5.58 percent of the cases are due to serious risks to the mother’s life, while 3.12 percent are due to abnormalities of the fetus deemed serious, 0.29 percent again due to abnormalities of the fetus deemed incompatible with life, and the remaining cases–i.e., 91.01 percent (!!!)–relate instead to that universe of economic or psychological pretexts that sound like a death sentence for innocent little ones. Statistics still tell us that 72.42% of abortions were performed during the first weeks of pregnancy, while 0.16% were performed beyond the 23rd week.
The applicants are mostly women between the ages of 20 and 39, but the average may drop even lower, given that the ruling Socialists and Communists proposed a law which was passed just recently and which reduces the minimum age for abortion to 16, also allowing for abortion without parental consent; in addition, it eliminates the minimum three-day waiting period for a possible reconsideration, and prosecutes conscientious objector doctors, throwing them off clinical committees charged with deciding on the life of the unborn child.
Conscientious objection is also in the crosshairs in the United States, where President Biden intends to repeal the rule sought by his predecessor Trump under the First Amendment to protect the conscience rights of health care workers so that it is never enforced, allowing pro-choice clinics to effectively force Christian doctors and nurses to practice and promote abortion and assisted suicide, unless they want to be cut off from public funds.
It is no better in Ireland, where 95 percent of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted, although–as the New York Times points out–common prenatal screening tests are not that reliable and false positives cannot be ruled out. The mere presumption of pathology, however, drives many, too many families to decide to “get rid” of their children, to eliminate them, to kill them in the womb, terrified by the prospect that the child might be a Down syndrome one. The pathology hypothesis prevails in the imagination of these parents and in the spirit of eugenics condemns all these little ones to death.
By now, everywhere in the world the alarm has been sounded resulting from the demographic winter; people are no longer being born, and even from a purely pragmatic point of view, this poses a host of problems. Yet this is the only emergency, which–unbelievably–not only do we not seem to want to remedy, offer solutions for, provide answers with incentivizing family policies, pro-motherhood aid and so on, but on the contrary, we aggravate it with birth control and abortion policies, which represent the exact opposite of what should be done. A decidedly masochistic attitude with respect to which John Paul II on October 11, 1985, in his address to participants at the VI Symposium of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences, already spoke of “the demographic suicide of Europe,” calling on the Old Continent to find itself and its soul. Since then nothing has happened; his appeal has not been taken up. Barring unpredictable changes of course, the fate is sealed….
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