Former Attorney General responds to attempt to legalize anencephaly abortion in Brazil

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Aug 13, 2009 / 12:28 pm

The former Attorney General of Brazil, Claudio Fonteles, has strongly called for the defense of the unborn in response to a new effort to get the Supreme Court to legalize abortion in cases of anencephaly.

 

Interim Attorney General Deborah Duprat, who held the post for 22 days earlier this year, filed motions before Brazil’s high court in support of anencephaly abortion and the legalization of homosexual unions.

 

Fonteles, who consistently opposed abortion in cases of babies with disabilities and deformities, published his objections this week to the opinions of Duprat, who took advantage of her short term to push the pro-abortion agenda.

 

He questioned Duprat’s insistence that abortion is necessary in such cases because these babies have a very brief life span.  “This reasoning is totally incompatible with the constitutional principle of the inviolability of human life,” Fonteles said.

 

“Human life is inviolable, it is a personal right that is individually guaranteed and leads to the necessary conclusion that the length of a human life—whether 3 seconds, 3 minutes, 3 hours, 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years—is not a decisive factor” in its deliberate elimination.

 

He also criticized Duprat’s assertion that the recognition of human dignity necessarily entails respect for each person’s free determination to “make fundamental decisions about their own lives and to act without interference from the State or from third parties.”

 

The “constitutional principle of human dignity safeguards the self-determination of each man and woman because everybody, man and woman alike, from the moment of conception, is in constant and unceasing movement through the cycles that compose our lives. We are embryos, later fetuses, newborns, infants, young people, adults and elderly. We are able to experience each of the cycles.”

 

Fonteles also disputed the notion that the mother should have total power over her unborn child. This is actually discrimination against the father, making him a person “who counts for nothing.” A “reproductive autonomy that only serves the interest of the mother” must not be accepted, he insisted.