Mexico City, Mexico, Mar 19, 2007 / 10:43 am
The Bishops’ Conference of Mexico has expressed its absolute rejection of a “program of extermination” that is currently being debated in Mexico City’s legislative assembly and that would allow abortion up to the fourteenth week of pregnancy. Proposed legislation would also open the door to allowing doctors to prescribe the abortion pill RU-486. The bishops are calling on lawmakers and all Mexicans to “reaffirm their commitment to life.”
“Faced with this program of extermination, as pastors, but above all as human beings, we are obliged to raise our voice in support of the life of the most defenseless,” the bishops said in a statement signed by the president of the conference, Bishop Carlos Aguiar Retes, and by conference secretary Bishop Jose Leopoldo Gonzalez Gonzalez.
The bishops emphasized that a new human life begins at conception and that science confirms that the new life has, from the first moment, its own unique genetic code and characteristics. “But even if there were some doubt as to whether the fruit of conception is already a human person,” to risk a homicide of the unborn “is objectively a grave sin,” they said.
The statement also alludes to the Mexican Constitution, which “established respect for life as the foundation of all other rights” and emphasizes that “the State has the duty to guarantee and support respect for the life of every human being.”
Therefore, the bishops issued “an urgent call to legislators, scientists, and health care professionals, and all the people of Mexico to reaffirm their commitment to life,” and they recalled that “the essential task of a just and inclusive society should be the protection of all human beings, from conception to natural death.”
Those who “are responsible for creating more just laws” should contribute “decisively to promoting comprehensive recognition of human rights through the defense of life,” the bishops added.
Amidst the debate over the legalization of abortion that is taking place in Mexico City’s legislative assembly, the spokesman for the Archdiocese of Mexico City, Hugo Valdemar, warned that some political groups want to turn the Mexican nation into a homicidal society, when the vast majority is not in favor of the practice.
Valdemar pointed out that lawmakers of the Socialist PRD party “do not want to understand that it is not true that the people support these reforms or that the majority of the country is left-wing.” He noted that a recent poll showed that 30% of the country identifies itself as leftist.
He said it was “pitiful” that some would try to convert the Mexican people into a homicidal society by legalizing abortion for the mere reason that a woman feels pregnancy would be an inconvenience to her personal development.”