Nicaraguan bishops fail in attempts to force 9-year-old to give birth. (In Catholic Circles).The Nicaraguan bishops' conference failed in its attempts to force a nine-year-old girl to carry her pregnancy to term. The girl, who had been raped on a trip to Costa Rica Costa Rica (kŏs`tə rē`kə), officially Republic of Costa Rica, republic (2005 est. pop. 4,016,000), 19,575 sq mi (50,700 sq km), Central America. , had the abortion when her parents and feminist groups found a doctor willing to do the procedure. Nicaraguan Health Minister Lucia Salvo initially said that she would prosecute anybody involved in the abortion, while Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo Miguel Cardinal Obando y Bravo (born February 2, 1926) was the Archbishop of Managua from 1985 until his resignation on March 12, 2005. He was one of the cardinal electors who participated in the 2005 papal conclave that selected Pope Benedict XVI. said those who supported and carried out the abortion would be excommunicated. Conservative anti-choice groups and the Catholic bishops' conference expressed the fear that the case may open the way towards reform of the current abortion legislation. Indeed, Nicaragua's National Assembly has said it may now consider changes to the law. Abortion is currently legal when the woman's life is threatened by her pregnancy or the fetus fetus, term used to describe the unborn offspring in the uterus of vertebrate animals after the embryonic stage (see embryo). In humans, the fetal stage begins seven to eight weeks after fertilization of the egg, when the embryo assumes the basic shape of the newborn is severely malformed mal·formed adj. Abnormally or faultily formed. . In a letter to the editor of El Pais (Spain), Paloma Alfonso of Catolicas por el Derecho De`re´cho n. 1. A straight wind without apparent cyclonic tendency, usually accompanied with rain and often destructive, common in the prairie regions of the United States. a Decidir en Espana responded to the bishops' statement, "As a Catholic and mother of three, as a woman in the struggle for the rights of all people, I say to the bishops, you have no right to speak like this to women. You do not have a right to speak like this to the little Nicaraguan girl and history will judge you very seriously for your blindness and lack of sensibility." The Nicaraguan attorney general has since stated that no charges will be brought against those involved as the abortion was legal and the bishops have withdrawn the threats of excommunication excommunication, formal expulsion from a religious body, the most grave of all ecclesiastical censures. Where religious and social communities are nearly identical it is attended by social ostracism, as in the case of Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated by the Jews. . |
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