[Update] Regarding excommunication of the Brazilian doctors & mother

Anyone (with certain exemptions) who consciously worked to stop a birth excommunicated himself/herself, so:

Brazil’s Catholic bishops conference denied that the archbishop of Recife and Olinda, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, excommunicated the mother and doctors who practiced a legal abortion on a nine-year-old girl that was pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather. . . . The secretary general of the bishops conference, Dimas Lara Barbosa, said that the prelate “at no time excommunicated anyone."

Too cunning an attempt at damage-control.

Sunday, Archbishop Rino Fisichella in the Vatican newspaper that the public declaration of the already automatic excommunications associated with the abortion were "hasty" and the nine-year-old girl, whose life was saved by the abortion of twins she was physically unequipped to have, "should have been above all defended, embraced, treated with sweetness to make her feel that we were all on her side, all of us, without distinction."

Since that didn't happen, the matter "has impacted the credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as insensitive, incomprehensible and devoid of mercy."

Truly. Continuously, for many of us, we suspect.

Update: Excommunicated doctor hailed as hero

Brazilian Minister of Health Jose Gomes Temporao called on the audience at a national convention on women's health in Brasilia to acknowledge the "brilliant" work done by a medical team in the abortion, performed in Brazil's northeastern city of Recife.

Those in attendance responded with a standing ovation, according to the newspaper O Povo.

But the president, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, condemned the excommunication and praised the doctors for their decision to perform the abortion on the girl, who was 15 weeks pregnant. "

According to the Telegraph, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio 'Lula' da Silva a Christian and a Catholic said, "I deeply regret that a bishop has had such conservative behaviour. In this case, medicine is more right than the Church."

CNN reports:

Dr. Olimpio Moraes, one of the doctors involved in the procedure, said he thanked the archbishop for his excommunication because the controversy sheds light on Brazil's restrictive abortion laws. He said women in Brazil's countryside are victimized by Brazil's ban on abortion.

Conditions for women in Brazil are often brutal.

IPAS, a non-governmental organization that works with the Brazilian health ministry, found in a recent study that more than 1 million women undergo illegal abortions in Brazil each year. About 250,000 women are treated by doctors for botched abortions.

In addition, studies at the Brazilian hospital Perola Byington in Sao Paulo, which is dedicated to treating female victims of violence, indicate that more than 40 percent of its cases involved children.