Miriam Araujo, 25, caresses Lucas, her 4-months old child born with microcephaly as he sleeps on a hammock inside their house, in Sao Jose dos Cordeiros, Brazil February 16, 2016. Picture taken on February 16, 2016. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes – RTX287P8
Source: RNS
RIO DE JANEIRO (RNS) Dr. Olimpio Moraes is used to being at the center of controversy. He’s been excommunicated twice by Brazil’s Roman Catholic Church for actively supporting abortion.
Recently, the obstetrician has thrown his weight behind a civil rights campaign preparing to launch a legal challenge for the rights of pregnant women to abort fetuses with the Zika virus-linked microcephaly.
The pro-abortion lobby has won support from Católicas Direito de Decidir (Catholic’s Right to Decide) a nongovernmental Sao Paulo-based women’s organization. This week it called on its 33,000 Facebook members to “take to the streets” on March 8, International Women’s Day, to protest and raise awareness of the need to protect women in a country where abortion is a crime.
When Moraes was excommunicated, he had been a practicing Catholic. The first time, in 2006, the church said it was censuring him for promoting the distribution of the morning-after pill during Carnival, the period of public revelry the week before Lent in Roman Catholic countries.
Three years later, the church condemned him for performing an abortion on a 9-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather and impregnated with twins. The church also excommunicated the girl’s mother but not the rapist.
Legislation in most Latin American nations allows for termination of a pregnancy in cases of rape; when a woman’s life is in danger; and in cases of anencephaly, where a baby develops without a brain.
Moraes, 54, is consulting the pro-abortion camp and said he now rarely goes to church and has lost his faith.
“My exclusion meant I could not participate in religious sacraments,” he said. “Instead it has led me to question eternal life and whether there is a God. My medical commitment has always been about having compassion, understanding suffering and showing respect for a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body.”
His wife and three children continue to be practicing Catholics.
Brazil is grappling with unprecedented levels of babies born with the serious birth defect that stunts the normal growth of a fetus’s head and brain during the early stages of development and causes neurological abnormalities and developmental delays.
Categories: Americas, Belief, Brazil, Catholics, Culture, Disease, Politics, South America, The Muslim Times