Germany's Roman Catholic Church said on Thursday it had decided to permit certain types of "morning-after pill" for women who have been raped, after two Catholic hospitals provoked an outcry last month for refusing to treat a rape victim.
The German Bishops' Conference said church-run hospitals would now ensure proper medical, psychological and emotional care for rape victims - including administering pills that prevent pregnancy without inducing an abortion.
Archbishop Robert Zollitsch said a four-day meeting of German bishops in the western town of Trier had "confirmed that women who have been victims of rape will get the proper human, medical, psychological and pastoral care".
"That can include medication with a 'morning-after pill' as long as this has a prophylactic and not an abortive effect," he said in a statement. "Medical and pharmaceutical methods that induce the death of an embryo may still not be used."
That means there is no change to the Catholic church's ban on the so-called abortion pill based on the drug mifepristone or RU-486, and marketed as Mifegyne or Mifeprex. (Source)
Impressive...
Precisely because the distribution of the pills will always happen in an emergency situation, it will often be hard to know if fertilization has occurred or not - and therefore there is always a great, even overwhelming, chance that what is done by the pill is plain abortion. Even the contraceptive guide of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) - not exactly a pro-life organization...-, following a serious controversy on the actual consequences of the "morning-after pill", describes that the mechanism of emergency contraception works in one of the following ways:
• It works mainly by stopping the release of an egg from the ovary. It may also work by preventing fertilization of an egg (the uniting of sperm with the egg) or by preventing attachment (implantation [of the newly-conceived human being]) to the womb (uterus). (Link and background information provided by a professor in a... Baptist seminary.)
Let us make clear: this is not a discussion on specific arguments of Moral Theology on the licitude of contraception for victims of rape - but on the fact that the "morning-after pill" not only can be abortifacient, but has abortion (prevention of the implantation of the newly-conceived human being) as one of the explicit scientific mechanisms through which its goal may be reached.
The matter if not even that new, quite the contrary. 18 years ago, Pope John Paul II stressed the abortifacient consequences of many contraceptives:
The matter if not even that new, quite the contrary. 18 years ago, Pope John Paul II stressed the abortifacient consequences of many contraceptives:
The close connection which exists, in mentality, between the practice of contraception and that of abortion [...] is being demonstrated in an alarming way by the development of chemical products, intrauterine devices and vaccines which, distributed with the same ease as contraceptives, really act as abortifacients in the very early stages of the development of the life of the new human being. (Evangelium vitae, 13)
Therefore, if the woman who is an unfortunate victim of such crimes is in her fertile period, there is an incredibly high chance that the use of emergency contraception, now liberally provided by German Catholic hospitals, will result in the abortion of a newly-conceived human being.
At the very least, the German Bishops should be honest: "Yes, we know that some newly-conceived human beings will be eliminated and destroyed as a result of substances given in our hospitals, but that is quite fine because in most cases that will probably not occur, though we cannot even really be sure of that!" Alas, honesty is not to be expected from the princes of Catholic sophistry, for whom there is only one adage: Roma locuta, causa infinita...
