"You can't talk about the right to kill a human being just because it's temporarily in the mother's womb, who is so defenseless that it can't defend itself and needs us adults," said Karla Martínez del Rosal de Rodríguez, of the Pro-Life Pastoral Ministry of the Archdiocese of Santiago de Guatemala.
For the Guatemalan pro-life leader, " you can't talk about equality if your right to life is decided upon in an arbitrary fashion; life is the most fundamental of rights, recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ratified by the Pact of San José [of the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights]."
Julia Regina de Cardenal, of the El Salvador Yes to Life Foundation, pointed out that the real figures disprove that the cases of microcephaly connected to Zika are numerous.
According to the BBC, it is estimated that one percent of women who had Zina during pregnancy will have a child with microcephaly. Brazilian doctors, however, "have told the BBC that as many as 20% of Zika-affected pregnancies will result in a range of other forms of brain damage to the baby in the womb."
Regina de Cardenal charged that "The pro-abortion lobby is exploiting this health crisis to legalize the abortion industry," and recalled that "the unborn baby has the right to life, even when it may have an illness or birth defects."
Sara Larín, president of the VIDA SV movement in El Salvador, said that this "is not the first time the OAS is using fear tactics in order to impose abortion in Latin American countries."
"They did it with the overpopulation issue, and now with a great deal of opportunism they're using the health crisis surrounding Zika to instill fear concerning pregnant women," she said.
The president of the pro-life platform ArgentinosAlerta, Martín Patrito, warned that "we're dealing with bad policy, a lot of ideology, and a little science on the part of international organizations like the OAS and the World Health Organization."
"Microcephaly has numerous causes, there are a lot of other viruses that can cause it and the impact of a lot of pesticides has still not been studied. And in any case, you have to fight the mosquito, not the children."
The Zika outbreak has also led to debate in the US over the Helms Amendment, which bars US government aid from funding abortions when given to overseas groups working with reproductive health.
A vaccine for Zika has yet to be developed, but there are suggestions that infecting mosquitos with a bacterium could help prevent them from spreading Zika.
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