Argentinean bishop denounces bill that would promote sterilizations

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jun 28, 2005 / 22:00 pm

In a statement released this week, Bishop Jorge Luis Lona of San Luis, Argentina, denounced a local proposal that would allow for the use of public resources to promote surgical sterilizations.

Bishop Lona noted in his statement that sterilization is a form of contraception that is “practically irreversible” and is a form of mutilation.  Reversal is successful in only a small number of cases, he maintained.

He warned that “real experience” indicate that those who would undergo such a procedure would be mostly young, poor women who have few children, and not those who have many, as promoters wish people to believe.

The bishop also called the plan part of “an injustice called ‘eugenics,’ in which the supposedly ‘least apt’ lose the possibility of procreating.”  He added that women would suffer more under the plan because men are more resistant to the idea of getting sterilized.

Bishop Lona noted that the measure would violate Argentina’s penal code, which punishes any action that “deprives the capacity to engender or conceive.”  Nor would the measure allow for conscientious objection, thus forcing doctors “to commit a crime.”

Pope John Paul II’s prophetic encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the bishop continued, warned about “what is occurring today in our country and in our province,” where people’s lives are being threatened “by the influx of vast world powers” that are promoting and imposing anti-life family planning methods because of a supposed threat to their own countries by the growing populations of poor nations.