Peruvian cardinal criticizes health minister’s decision to allow morning-after pill

Lima, Peru, Mar 19, 2010 / 15:58 pm

This week, the Archbishop of Lima called the recent decision by Peruvian Health Minister Oscar Ugarte to allow the distribution of the morning-after pill a “direct and frontal assault on the Constitutional Court.”  Last year the court ruled to prohibit the drug because of its abortifacient mechanisms in preventing the implantation of an embryo.

During his radio program, “Dialogue of Faith,” Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, Archbishop of Lima said, “It is good that we address this issue calmly without unnecessary rhetoric, but we must ask Minister Ugarte to be a little bit more consistent and not try to fool us, right?”

“What we need to be clear about regarding this issue of the pill is that if our institutions are not strengthened, the country will not move forward. The Constitutional Court is an institution, the Executive Branch is an institution, the Legislative, etc, and I think that the actions of the minister were a direct and frontal assault on the Constitutional Court.  I don’t think this was the smartest decision and from both the moral and scientific points of view, there is a great deal of doubt in what (the Minister) is saying – and he knows it.”

Cardinal Cipriani also recalled that the Church’s evaluation of the pills' effects is based on extremely accurate data from doctors and scientists.  “As the bishops' conference has said, we seek life and the truth.  This pill is an abortifacient,” the cardinal said.

Cardinal Cipriani said he was speaking “in the name of the unborn children in the wombs of their mothers who have no voice, and in the name of 99 percent of those mothers who I am sure want to have their babies. Let us not seek to cut off life,” but rather defend it, he concluded.