Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sep 12, 2007 / 09:30 am
The Corporation of Catholic Lawyers has denounced a ruling by a court in the city of Parana allowing a handicapped young woman to undergo an abortion, saying the ruling is based on “eugenic and racists doctrines” in the country’s Penal Code, and therefore called for the ruling to be revoked.
The case involves a mentally-disturbed young woman in Parana who became pregnant through rape. Judge Claudia Salomon’s initial ruling was in favor of the unborn child, but a higher court recently ruled to allow the abortion. The group of Catholic lawyers pointed out that the 1919 law upon which the ruling was based “was founded upon eugenic and racists doctrines that were in vogue, but whose proponents did not reveal that they were intended to sustain the National Socialist regime established in Germany in 1933.”
A Senate committee at that time recommended abortion be allowed “for the purposes of the perfection of the race.” “With these racists arguments,” the lawyers said, “the absolutory excuse was introduced into the Penal Code which they now wish to apply, in order to leave the unborn without protection.”
The lawyers also pointed out that the “absolutory excuses” foreseen in the Code violate the Constitution, which protects human life from the moment of conception. “For this reason, in a recent ruling the country’s Supreme Court recalled that ‘the right to life is the first natural right of the human person, pre-existing all positivist legislation and is guaranteed by the National Constitution,” they said.
“The rulings issued by all of the justices of the country and that leave the unborn without legal and judicial protection lack constitutional validity, making it irrelevant whether those affected are in their first week or ninth month of gestation. Everyone has the same right to life,” the doctors stated.