Vatican Now Defends Nine-Year-Old Rape Victim's Abortion

Wash. Post: Vatican Official Defends Child's Abortion, by Francis X. Rocca:

The Vatican's top bioethics official said the two Brazilian doctors who performed an abortion on a 9-year-old rape victim do not merit excommunication, because they acted to save her life.

The statement, by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, appeared as the lead article in last Sunday's issue of the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano....

The case drew international attention earlier this month after the local Catholic archbishop excommunicated the doctors who aborted the girl's twin fetuses, as well as the girl's mother.

The child was 15 weeks pregnant, allegedly after being raped by her stepfather. Weighing only 80 pounds, she might have died if forced to carry the pregnancy to term, the doctors said....

Fisichella's article also implicitly contradicted Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Vatican's Congregation for Bishops, who had publicly defended Cardoso Sobrinho's action earlier this month.