Bishop Alejandro Goic

Santiago, Chile, Jul 10, 2009 / 06:08 pm (CNA).- The president of the Bishops’ Conference of Chile, Bishop Alejandro Goic, is calling a  proposed new law on birth control being debated in the country’s House of Representatives, “a way to get around the obstacles put in place by the Supreme Court and by the Comptroller” against the distribution of the “morning-after pill.”
 
In a speech to the Congressional Health Care Committee, Bishop Goic lamented that in recent years “the Chilean political society and its institutions” have focused on promoting the morning-after pill and not on “authentic prevention consistent with human dignity.” Instead, lawmakers should focus on  providing a “thorough solution to the problems that derive from the misuse of human sexuality.” 

“It is difficult to understand that the State offers a credit to mothers for every child that is born and at the same time establishes public policies about unwanted children,” the bishop said.
 
Bishop Goic argued that the Ministry of Health is not the proper agency for providing formation in the areas of emotions and sexuality in a way that “respects the beliefs and personal formation of each individual.”  “Why is the country’s entire public and private educational system excluded? The impression is given that the sole intention of this measure is to simply make contraceptive methods, both hormonal and non-hormonal, available to people” including the so-called “morning-after pill.”
 
The bishop said the proposed law reduces education to merely the informing about “techniques” available for preventing pregnancy or eliminating human life, and the reason is that the underlying anthropology “sees the human person from an incomplete perspective: as a hedonist, materialist and individualistic being.”
 
“An issue as delicate as human life” cannot be addressed solely from the dimension of contraceptive policies and in the heat of an electoral campaign, Bishop Goic stressed.
 
While policies such as these are supposed to be intended to eliminate unwanted pregnancies, they do nothing to address the underlying issue of sexual promiscuity which gives rise to such problems, he pointed out.
 
Only by providing an education based on moral values can society help individuals to live healthily and responsibly, the bishop said.  “For those of us who believe in Christ, the fruit of sexual relations is not a problem but rather a human life that deserves to be born, to grow, to be loved and to develop in all its fullness.”

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