Colombian cardinal threatens physicians who perform abortions with excommunication

A Colombian news report on Tuesday "sparked controversy" after reporting that a Vatican official threatened to excommunicate physicians who perform abortions in the country, the AP/San Francisco Chronicle reports (AP/San Francisco Chronicle, 8/30).

The country's highest court, the Constitutional Court, in May voted to effectively legalize abortion in cases of rape, incest, to save the life of the woman or when the fetus is expected to die after birth because of severe fetal abnormalities.

Under the ruling, abortion in all other cases still will carry a sentence of up to three years in prison for the woman undergoing an abortion and for the physician performing the procedure.

The first legal abortion in the country recently was performed (Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 8/28).

According to a news report from Colombia's RCN television, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, said, "Every Christian Catholic who submits to an abortion, whether it be directly or indirectly, will be excommunicated" (AP/San Francisco Chronicle, 8/30).

RCN also reported that Trujillo said physicians, nurses, "relatives, politicians and lawmakers" associated with the procedure should be excommunicated (Brodzinsky, Guardian, 8/31).

Trujillo in an interview with Caracol Radio denied the news report, saying, "I have not said that, nor has the Holy See, nor have I thought it" (AP/San Francisco Chronicle, 8/30). Monsignor Libardo Ramirez, president of Colombia's ecclesiastic tribunal, said that according to canonical law, excommunication applies to any person who participates in the "murder of a child in the womb."

He added that it would be up to Cardinal Rubiano Saenz, who is the leading figure of the Roman Catholic church in Colombia, to decide whether to formally apply the sanctions (Guardian, 8/31).

As many as 400,000 illegal abortions occur annually in Colombia, the majority of which are performed in unsanitary, clandestine clinics (Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 5/12).