Gynecologists and obstetricians of Ecuador reject abortion

Guayaquil, Ecuador, May 28, 2008 / 14:33 pm

In a document containing fifteen conclusions from a “Workshop on the Prevention of Abortion,” organized in Guayaquil by the Ecuadorian Federation of Societies of Gynecology and Obstetrics, doctors agreed on the need to reject abortion as a way of solving problems related to women’s health.

During the workshop, which was held at the Enrique Sotomayor Hospital, where no less than 100 children are born per day, doctors and specialists in obstetrics drafted a document with 15 conclusions, which they signed on May 23.

The conclusions state that the members of the Federation do not support abortion of any kind.  “Life is inviolable from the moment of conception. The elimination of an innocent human being is ethically and medically speaking always unacceptable,” they said.

They went on to note that “science teaches that life begins and conception.  If this truth is also affirmed by religions it does not therefore cease to be a strictly scientific truth to only become a debatable religious opinion.  Whoever denies that life begins at conception doesn’t have an issue with religion but rather with science.  To deny this certainty of biology is not an expression of a lack of faith, but rather a lack of an elementary knowledge of human genetics, or even worse, of simple general culture,” the doctors said.

“No matter what name is given to this new human person,” they continued, “zygote, morula, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, newborn, infant, teenage, young person, adult, elderly, terminally ill…They are all denominations of the one and same human person in the different stages of development through which he or she passes.”

The doctors acknowledged that certain pregnancies can present dilemmas, “but we know what not to do: directly kill the child, making ourselves into the owners and masters of life and death. Doctors are agents of life and not ambassadors of death,” they said.  “Let us not forget that the second victim of an abortion is the mother who aborts.  Modern psychiatry and psychology has coined the term ‘post-abortion syndrome’.  We must remember that a mother can remove her child more easily from her womb than she can from her mind and her heart,” the doctors stressed.

They also noted that a doctor can sometimes be faced with a conflict between the life of the mother and the life of the child.  In such situations “therapeutic abortion” is presented as the solution, but this term “is unfortunate and shameful” because the word “therapeutic” is synonymous with “healing,” and the doctor is killing the baby in order to save the life of the mother.  “The life of the mother and the baby can never be subjected to an act of direct suppression: a doctor never kills,” they said.

The Federation plans to send its final document to “the highest levels of government” and to the members of the Constitutional Assembly, which is drafting a new constitution and is under pressure from anti-life groups to legalize abortion in Ecuador.