Pope Stepping into an Abortion Debate

By Larry Rohter

Just hours before Pope Benedict XVI was scheduled to arrive here on his first pastoral visit to Latin America, a heated dispute broke out between the Roman Catholic Church and the Brazilian government about abortion. Church officials have said the pope will reaffirm the Vatican’s traditional stand on the issue in public pronouncements during his five day visit. But the cordial atmosphere that had been expected now appears to be threatened by sharp exchanges between senior officials in the Brazilian government and their counterparts in the church to which an estimated 140 million Brazilians belong.

The controversy began Monday, when President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva gave a radio interview to Roman Catholic radio stations in which he said he was of two minds about abortion. Though personally opposed, he said, as president he believes that “the state cannot abdicate from caring for this as a public health question, because to do so would lead to the death of many young women in this country.”

Except in very limited and specific circumstances, abortion is against the law in Brazil, which is the most populous Roman Catholic nation in the world. But estimates of the number of illegal abortions performed annually here, in clandestine clinics known in Brazilian slang as “angel factories,” run between one and two million.

The minister of health, Jose Gomes Temporao, suggested in March that it might be appropriate to change current law, which calls for a prison sentence as long as three years for a woman convicted of an illegal abortion. He called for a national referendum on abortion. The response was attacks from pulpits across the country and a protest march Tuesday in Brasilia, the capital.

On Tuesday, after the president’s initial remarks, Temporao, a doctor specializing in public health, returned to the issue. He described abortion as “a theme that should be treated delicately,” and complained that “some sectors of the church have made declarations that are very aggressive and quite distant from the teachings of Jesus.”

That statement drew an immediate and caustic rejoinder from a spokesman for the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, which represents Brazil’s 429 Roman Catholic bishops. Temporao’s job is to be “the minister of health and not of death,” said the spokesman, Monsignor Angelico Sandalo Bernardino.

In another, related statement, the Brazilian church’s senior cleric, Cardinal Geraldo Majella Agnello, also condemned government policies on reproductive health, which have won praise from international public health groups. He singled out sexual education and condom distribution programs, which have helped cut AIDS transmission rates, saying they promoted immorality.

“This is inducing everyone into promiscuity,” Majella, who is the outgoing president of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, said in an interview with the Portuguese-language service of the BBC. “This is not respect for life or for real love. It’s like turning man into an animal.”

Da Silva is scheduled to meet with the pontiff Thursday in Sao Palo, Brazil’s largest city. The president’s press spokesman, Marcelo Baumbach, said that while abortion was not on the government’s agenda, whether or not the matter was broached was “going to depend on the dynamic of their private conversation.”

(c) 2007 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.