Pope backs birth control over Zika virus
Pope Francis has suggested that women threatened with the Zika virus could use artificial contraception, saying there’s a clear moral difference between aborting a fetus and preventing a pregnancy.
The Pope was asked en route home from Mexico if abortion or birth control could be considered a “lesser evil,” when confronting the Zika crisis in Brazil, where some babies have been born with abnormally small heads to Zika-infected mothers.
The World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency over the Zika virus and its suspected links to birth defects. The virus has been reported in at least 34 countries, many of them in Central and Latin America.
The explosion of Zika cases has prompted some governments in the region to urge women to avoid getting pregnant. It has also fuelled calls from abortion rights groups to loosen the strict anti- abortion laws in the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic region.
But Francis excluded abortion absolutely from the debate. “Abortion isn’t a lesser evil, it’s a crime,” he said. “Taking one life to save another, that’s what the Mafia does. It’s a crime. It’s an absolute evil.”
He drew a parallel to the decision taken by Pope Paul VI in the 1960s to approve giving nuns in Belgian Congo artificial contraception to prevent pregnancies because they were being systematically raped.
Abortion “is an evil in and of itself, but it is not a religious evil at its root, no? It’s a human evil,” he said.
“On the other hand, avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil. In certain cases, as in this one (Zika), such as the one I mentioned of Blessed Paul VI, it was clear.”
Angelica Rivas, of the Feminist Collective for Social Development in El Salvador, said the Pope’s remarks would not be much help since the church in her country has consistently opposed sex education on the use of contraception, and birth control would not help the many women who are already pregnant.
“We have to give them the alternative of interrupting the pregnancy,” Rivas said.