Thursday, June 14, 2007

Pope Benedict and His Boys



In the Catholic church don't think that women who get pregnant from rape should get abortions:

A senior Vatican cardinal said yesterday that Catholics should stop donating to human rights group Amnesty International because of its new policy advocating abortion rights for women if they had been raped, were a victim of incest or faced health risks.

Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, accused Amnesty of turning its back on its mission to defend human rights.

"The inevitable consequence of this decision, according to the cardinal, will be the suspension of any financing to Amnesty on the part of Catholic organisations and also individual Catholics," said a statement from Cardinal Martino's office yesterday.

"AI has betrayed its mission," Cardinal Martino told the US National Catholic Register in an interview.

Cardinal Renato Martino may sincerely believe in the message he conveyed. But then he also will never get pregnant after having been raped or possibly even gang-raped.

If you read the whole article I linked to (via No Capital), you have already realized that Cardinal Martino is playing straight into the rapists' hands:

Amnesty changed its neutral stance on abortion in April, but its Italy chairman Paolo Pobbiati insisted its new position had been misinterpreted by the cardinal.

"This has nothing to do with legitimising abortion as part of a campaign for human rights, it is to do with combating violence against women," he said.

"It was partly inspired by our experience in Africa where soldiers rape women in communities they attack to force them to have their children. We also believe women who have had abortions should benefit from medical care regardless of the reason for the abortion. Moreover we aim to promote education and contraception to reduce abortion rates."

So if the good cardinal has his way, the rape of women in African wars will be more likely to pay off in producing forced childbirth and children. Not so nice. On the other hand, his rule would also mean that no woman can ever be sure that she won't be forced to bear children. All that requires is one rapist at the right time. So there is that.

I am slightly bitter today, because the majority of African women have very hard lives and few rights and Cardinal Romano doesn't want them to have the right to refuse a rapist's child. He prefers to leave them permeable by the first successful sperm, even if it comes from the testicles of someone filled with hate.

I don't share Romano's views of conception as the onset of a separate human life. (You might remember that my theory is an older one which posits that it is the sperm cells which contain the life and that women are just fields for the men's seeds. This means, not-so-accidentally, that it is men who commit abortion every time they masturbate or have nighttime ejaculations.) But even if I did I would find an all-male hierarchy a horrible way of deciding when a woman should give birth or even possibly die giving birth.


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In other religion news, Southern Baptists today approved a resolution which admits that global warming is real but questions the idea that humans are responsible for it. So.