Energetic statement by Mexican bishops against "morning after pill"

Mexico City, Mexico, Jan 26, 2004 / 22:00 pm

The Mexican Bishops Conference’s Family Ministry Committee has released a statement strongly rejecting the government’s decision to include so-called “emergency contraception” in the country’s official “family planning” services.

The bishops denounced the dangerous combination of hormones that can act to “impede the implantation of a fertilized ovum or embryo in the uterus wall, thereby causing an abortion and stopping the embryo from continuing its development.”

Moreover, the statement warns of the risk to the health of adolescents, since “studies indicate side effects which are not taken into account by this norm.”  The bishops insist that the morning after pill “is clearly abortifacient, in that it directly and voluntary ends the life of a newly conceived human being,” and they emphasize that “abortion is a gravely illicit act no matter which method is used to achieve it.”

The statement express the bishops’ concern for “the serious problem of adolescent pregnancies;” but they propose promoting education “for a responsible use of sexuality based on objective and universal ethical values, and not on simple information and the distribution and promotion of these types of products that only put women’s health in danger, especially that of adolescents.”

The bishops also warn that the spread of the morning after pill clearly shows “how the lines between contraception and abortion are increasingly more subtle and how both are a result of an anti-life mentality which is the fruit of the culture of death, which is against the Gospels.”