Lima, Peru, Mar 21, 2004 / 22:00 pm
In order to mark the celebration of the “Day of the Unborn Child,” which falls on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, the Peruvian Bishops Conference is calling on Catholics to stand up for life in the face of anti-life policies.
In a message issued by the Bishops’ Committee on the Family, the Conference recalls that the modern world does not respect the life of the unborn and they denounced attempts to implement “abominable policies such as legalized abortion and artificial contraception, widely promoted as ‘reproductive health policy’.”
The bishops exhort all Christians “to be aware of their responsibility to defend life at all its stages, and to commit to denouncing and fighting against whatever endangers the existence of those most fragile: human embryos, who are our unborn children.”
The message emphasizes that “to manipulate, prevent or avoid the implantation of the human embryo or to interrupt the life of a child before she is born is to erase it from eternity.”
The “Day of the Unborn Child” was instituted by the bishops of Peru in 2001 as an effort to strengthen respect for human life from the moment of conception and to reaffirm the conviction that all children are a gift and an concrete expression of the God’s trust in humanity.
According to the message, the date of March 25 was chosen because in the Annunciation, “Mary is a symbol of the new life of each human being, each of which, according to John Paul II, is ‘unique and unrepeatable, chosen and conceived of from all eternity, called and loved by his or her own name’.”