Church in Mexico warns of excommunication for use of "morning after pill"

Mexico City, Mexico, Jan 27, 2004 / 22:00 pm

The president of the Health Care Ministry of the Archdiocese of Mexico City, Fr. Jorge Palencia, is warning that people who use the “morning after pill” incur the canonical penalty of excommunication.

Fr. Palencia explained that this is not a “new” penalty created by Church in response to the controversial decision of the Secretary of Health to authorize the pill, which he called “post-coital hormonal contraception.”

Since one of the effects of the “morning after pill” is the prevention of implantation of a fertilized ovum, it results in an abortion, a crime which in the Catholic Church is already subject to the canonical penalty of excommunication reserved to the bishop.

Fr. Palencia said that “excommunication is an edict which is promulgated.  Each Christian knows that when one has passed the limit of going against the Eucharist or life, one is ‘de facto’ excommunicated, because one has separated oneself from the communion of believers.”

“The Church cannot be silent in the face of a genocide of this magnitude that approaches.  In the text of this norm the intention of population control is apparent, and we wonder:  Is the state truly the judge that determines how many people will live or the executioner who, using the Mexican tax-payers money, kills the innocent.”