Bogotá, Colombia, Oct 20, 2005 / 22:00 pm
In an opinion piece for the newspaper El Tiempo in Colombia, that country’s former Vice Minister of Justice, Rafael Nieto Loaiza, denounced the exaggerated statistics being used by abortion supporters to get the practice legalized in Colombia.
Referring to the interview granted to the same newspaper last Sunday by Colombia’s First Lady, Lina Morena de Uribe—in which she said she was in favor of the legalization of abortion in some circumstances—Nieto Loaiza explained that both the statistics cited by the First Lady and her arguments in favor of the change do not have a real basis in the country’s situation and that “she has not been sufficiently clear about certain points.”
“The first is that the case currently before the Constitutional Court seeks the general legalization of abortion, and only secondly does it refer to the cases of rape and life of the mother,” he said.
He pointed out that to say there are 400,000 abortions a year in Colombia “has no basis whatsoever,” noting that in Spain, where it is legal, 80,000 abortions were reported in 2002. Therefore, he continued, there is no reason to think that in Colombia, where the practice is illegal and where the roots of Christianity are deeper, 600% more abortions are occurring than in Spain.