Finally, a sensible voice speaks out on a controversy that has exercised the media - secular and Catholic alike - in the past few weeks and might have made as big a media splash as the Pope's remarks on condoms, were it not that everyone is more occupied now with the end of Benedict's Pontificate and looking to the new one...
On the German bishops’ decision to allow
contraceptive pill for rape victims
The Church has allowed it for 50 years in Africa
by Alessandro Speciale
February 23, 2013
The German bishops’ breakthrough decision on emergency contraception for rape victims has sparked heated debates and controversies in Germany and abroad.
It all began with the case of a girl who was raped and denied the morning-after pill in two Catholic hospitals in Cologne. The city’s archbishop, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, was asked to intervene, and after much reflection and various consultations, he agreed -with specific reservations - that an appropriate contraceptive pill should be made available in Catholic hospitals to victims of rape. German bishops supported his decision this week.
The President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Mgr. Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, spoke to Vatican Insider about this at the end of the Academy’s plenary assembly this week:
Monsignor, what are we really talking about here?
German bishops have decided to back their colleague, Cardinal Meisner, who has handed down a regulation to be implemented in Catholic hospitals in his diocese. It is exemplary because it reiterates what the Catholic Church has been proposing for the past 50 years, but it is being misrepresented.
How?
Because journalistic language is different from theological or clinical language. The “morning-after pill” is a journalistic, not a medical term. It does not appear in any prescription pads or prescriptions. This is why Cardinal Meisner stressed that the term “morning-after pill” can refer to a number of things and urged people not to use it indiscriminately.
All he did was tell doctors which criteria to follow: that it is acceptable for women who have been raped to receive medication that has an active contraceptive ingredient. He specifically said abortive medication should not be made available.
Why is contraceptive medication acceptable in rape cases but not in other circumstances?
The criteria the Church follows in its rejection of contraceptives can be found in Paul VI's encyclical,
Humanae Vitae, and even before that, in
Casti Connubii. In both cases, contraception is considered in the light of marital intercourse which consolidates a couple’s bond, which has a procreational purpose.
Rape, on the other hand, is a sexual act committed in violence [and in the usual cases, not between husband and wife]. In this case, the moral implications of contraception are lost. A violent act cannot be considered a demonstration of openness to life.
Why are people, including many Catholics, unable to grasp this principle and why is this issue so controversial?
These are extreme cases. People are more used to hearing about common cases rather than exceptional ones. But after what happened in the Congo during the war
[the early years of the still ongoing civil conflict), this regulation has been implemented in Catholic hospitals for fifty years. Some Catholic hospitals like the ones in Cologne are obviously not aware of it.
[Nor was Cardinal Meisner, apparently. But one has to argue in his behalf that he sought nonetheless to be more informed about the mechanism of action of so-called 'morning after' pills. He has been criticized because the experts he approached work for a company that sells contraceptive pills, i.e., would be more likely to give him the answer he wants to hear rather than objective scientific facts.]
Critics say this type of medication can cause an abortion, albeit unintentionally, and that this is not a risk we can afford to take. What are your thoughts on this?
The Church needs to shape people’s consciences.
What Church teaching says in this case is: in cases of rape all possible action must be taken to prevent a pregnancy but not to interrupt it. Whether a given medicine is classed as a contraceptive or abortion-inducing medication, is up to doctors and scientists, not the Church.
This question needs to be carefully analysed - a generic response that applies to everyone is not enough. It is therefore absurd that there is a law that requires any hospital to dispense just any pill to a woman who says she has been raped. The decision must be made by a doctor, based on his or her knowledge and experience. Too often, however, the pill is just handed out, without any interest being shown in the person as an individual.
[And there is still the physiological fact, as I feel I need to point out, that sometimes, contraception against a rape pregnancy may not even be necessary - if the rape occurs when a woman is well outside her monthly fertile period, in which case there is no ovulated egg available to be fertilized by any sperm. Even in women, especially girls, who are not familiar with their physiology, a simple blood test shortly after the rape will indicate whether they are close to ovulating, have just ovulated, or are safely outside the fertile period and do not need contraception at all.
The other consideration is that the same active ingredient in these pills can be both contraceptive and abortifacient, so the timing of when it is administered with respect to the rape is also a factor. If it is administered within 12 hours from the rape, it will prevent conception, but after that, if the victim's egg has been fertilized by the rapist's sperm, it becomes abortifacient, either by 'killing' the embryo directly, or preventing it from being able to implant itself on the wall of the uterus, so it will simply die out.]