Xalapa, Mexico, Jun 9, 2020 / 01:49 pm (CNA).- The Xalapa Cathedral and the Expiatory Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Mexico’s Veracruz state were vandalized June 8 during a march protesting local police repression.
According to La Silla … […]
CNA Staff, Jun 9, 2020 / 12:10 am (CNA).- June 5 marks three years since the Diocese of Cúcuta, Colombia opened its Divine Providence House of Transit in response to the thousands of Venezuelan migrants streaming into Colombia.
In those three y… […]
Mexico City, Mexico, Jun 8, 2020 / 06:42 pm (CNA).- With reports of domestic violence on the rise during the coronavirus lockdown in Mexico, one pro-life platform is offering women help, shelter and legal advice.
Linda Rebolledo, the coordinator and s… […]
CNA Staff, Jun 5, 2020 / 12:35 pm (CNA).- Pro-life leaders in El Salvador say a recent CBS News report on abortion in the country is misleading, and does not accurately portray factual narratives, amid a fight over the legalization of abortion in the country.
A CBS documentary “Jailed for Abortion in El Salvador” and an accompanying print report, were published online May 28. Pro-life advocates in the country say the report leaves out or misrepresents crucial information regarding landmark fights over abortion in the country.
The CBS report claimed that “more than 140 women have been charged under El Salvador’s total ban on abortion since 1998, incarcerated for up to 35 years in some of the world’s most notorious prisons. Many say they never had an abortion, but instead claim that after suffering a miscarriage they were wrongfully convicted when their doctors accused them of intentionally terminating their pregnancies.”
Alabama state Representative Merika Coleman visited last November a prison in El Salvador where some of those women are incarcerated. She told CBS News that if Roe vs. Wade is overturned “things that are going on in El Salvador could actually happen in the United States,”
The report mentioned the case of “Manuela,” whose real name is María Edis Hernández de Castra, a woman who according to CBS, claimed to have had a miscarriage and “was charged and convicted for aggravated homicide, and sentenced to 30 years in prison.”
Hernández served two years of her sentence before she died from Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2010.
“But a lawsuit brought on behalf of Manuela’s family after her death may bring change. Next year, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is expected to hear her case, and if the international body sides with Manuela and her family, El Salvador could be barred from prosecuting women who say they miscarried, according to an attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, the law firm representing the family,” CBS reported.
El Salvadoran pro-life organizations say that the case of Hernández, or Manuela, is one of numerous cases in El Salvador in which acts of infanctide have been reported as miscarriages, and used in litigation intended to promote the legalization of abortion.
According to VIDA SV, the trial documents in Hernández’ case indicate that her child died when he was discarded in a latrine shortly after his birth. At trial, Hernández claimed she did not know she was pregnant until she miscarried in the latrine. Prosecutors presented evidence that she discarded her child while he was alive, and argued that evidence indicated she’d done so knowingly. A jury agreed with the prosecution.
Sara Larín, president of the Fundación VIDA SV, and Ligia Castaldi, a professor at the Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida, published this year in the International Human Rights Review an exhaustive legal investigation of 25 cases, which explains in detail “the fraud involved in the Hernández case before the Inter-American Court” and the other cases.
Speaking June 3 to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish language news partner, Larín said that the Center for Reproductive Rights had “sent an intimidating letter” requesting Hernández’ name be redacted from that investigation, “alleging that it is necessary to protect the privacy of the relatives of the alleged victim.”
Larín pointed out that “CBS News itself and a documentary made by the Center for Reproductive Rights show the faces of family members and the family’s living conditions to emotionally manipulate public opinion in favor of this case.”
Larín further noted that Hernández “was not a victim, but a victimizer,” given her conviction for aggravated homicide.
“The sentence is public precisely because the right to privacy is reserved to the victims and not to the victimizers,” Larín stressed.
“She never disputed her guilt, did not file any appeal for review, and gave conflicting versions of the facts. The evidence shows that she committed the crime and those false versions were never found reasonable by the Court. It’s not true that she didn’t know that she was pregnant, she had already had three children previously, ”Larin explained.
In her testimony, “Maria Edis said that she had fallen into the river, that she had inadvertently expelled the child in the latrine, which according to forensic doctors was not possible; there was no evidence of any injuries from the alleged fall into the river. It was determined that the child was born alive, breathing, and survived between 10 and 20 minutes after being thrown into the latrine,” Larín said.
The court’s sentence said that Hernández’ statements were “contrary to logic and medicine,” and concluded that she deliberately caused the baby’s death.
The international campaign to legalize abortion
According to Larín, abortion proponents intend to create a legal precedent that forces the Salvadoran government to pay millions in compensation to the organizations that filed the lawsuit.
“That money will have to be financed from the taxes of the entire Salvadoran people so these pro-abortion groups can continue to use it to bombard us with ideologies contrary to the law, morality and good customs,” she said.
Another pro-life leader, Julia Regina de Cardenal, the president of the Fundación Sí a la Vida (Yes to Life) in El Salvador, told ACI Prensa June 3 that this “slanderous international campaign against El Salvador to legalize the abortion industry is financed by petty interests capable of the worst tricks to achieve their goal. “
De Cardenal said that the other cases presented in the documentary and in the CBS News articles were also “being manipulated” since “they have nothing to do with abortions.”
“These women were convicted for the aggravated homicide of their children who were born alive,” she said.
Babies allegedly miscarried have been found “strangled, struck with a stone, with fractures to the neck, stabbed, abandoned in septic tanks or inside plastic bags that had been hidden,” she said.
“They were all full term babies who breathed, but were cruelly killed.”
De Cardenal pointed out that in El Salvador “there is not a single serious media outlet that has published the lies repeated in the international propaganda media, that women are hated and persecuted here; that hundreds of women are imprisoned for abortion; that poor women who had ‘miscarriages,’ ‘obstetric emergencies’ or ‘non-hospital deliveries’ are given 40 years in prison.”
“That’s false,” she underscored.
De Cardenal emphasized that in El Salvador miscarriage is not punishable, and that “this farce is so absurd because women are not even imprisoned for induced abortion.”
“Why? Because the penalty for induced abortion is 2 to 8 years (not 40) and the judges don’t hate or persecute the women, instead they give them alternative sentencing, ” she explained.
The Yes to Life Foundation representative said that the Salvadoran people “are fed up with the lack of respect and insults of deceitful foreign actresses and journalists who accuse us of having a ‘medieval, draconian law,’ when in reality we have legislation that truly protects equal human rights for all people, which ought to serve as a model for the rest of the world. ”
“Why are they lying? Because they know that very few people would support the infanticide they are defending, ” she said.
De Cardenal believes that “it is not surprising that those who profit from exploiting women in crisis pregnancies by killing their unborn children, also defend killing them after they’re born.”
“Fortunately, we Salvadorans are pro-life and we know that these women need all our support, not violence and death,” she added.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
CNA Staff, Jun 3, 2020 / 05:57 pm (CNA).- A total of 434 human rights organizations from 16 countries have released a manifesto condemning the push from external groups to promote abortion in their nations during the coronavirus pandemic.
The “International Manifesto for the Right to Life” was delivered this week to the foreign ministry offices of Costa Rica, Argentina, Peru, and Ecuador.
It repudiates the U.N.’s Humanitarian Response Plan COVID-19 for Ecuador, which requires “safe, legal abortion” as a condition for aid.
The plan claims to be “humanitarian aid” but “includes a $3 million allocation to train health care personnel in so-called ‘safe and legal abortion,’ in violation of the Constitution and Ecuadoran laws,” the manifesto says.
The manifesto also rejects the “Joint Statement on Protecting Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and Promoting Gender-responsiveness in the COVID-19 Crisis” signed by representatives of 59 countries – including Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Peru – which promotes access to abortion.
The International Manifesto for the Right to Life argues that there is a major disconnect between the efforts to promote abortion and the broader society’s focus on safeguarding human life amid the coronavirus crisis. Many of the countries in question have protections in their constitutions, criminal codes, and civil codes to protect human life of the moment of conception, the document notes.
Instead of advocating for pro-abortion policies, the right to life manifesto calls for a “focus on public policies based on human dignity, and for effectively putting an end to any attempt to interfere with or attack the sovereignty of our countries, in particular coming from the U.N. and its principal agencies.” It pointed specifically to the United Nations Population Fund, UN Women, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.
Martha Villafuerte, a representative of Ecuador for the Family, argued that international aid “must come without conditions or financial coercion.” She noted that Ecuador currently has the highest level of coronavirus deaths per capita recorded in Latin America.
“[I]t is unacceptable to try to take advantage of the situation to slip in through the back door a crime that the Constitution rejects,” she said.
Luis Losada, director of CitizenGO Campaigns for Latin America, called the U.N. effort to promote abortion in Ecuador a textbook example of “ideological interference.” A CitizenGO petition opposing the international pressure for abortion has garnered more than 32,000 signatures.
“[The international interference] violates the statutes of the United Nations that expressly commit it to not interfere in national policies or legislation, respecting the sovereignty of nations,” Losada said. “It violates the Constitution of Ecuador that protects the right to life from the moment of conception. And it violates the parliamentary debate (in Ecuador) that took place last year on the proposal to decriminalize abortion, which fortunately did not succeed.”
Losada said the U.N.’s humanitarian proposal is “an insult not only to the sovereignty of Ecuador but to that of the rest of the countries in the region, which take note of the impunity with which this interference is being done.”
“[T]he government of Ecuador must defend its sovereignty, national dignity, the Constitution and the right to life by rejecting this illegal and immoral proposal by the United Nations,” he said.
This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
CNA Staff, Jun 1, 2020 / 02:00 pm (CNA).- Argentina’s digital March for Life May 30 drew 390,000 participants on Facebook alone, according to preliminary numbers from march organizers.
The pro-life effort came on the heels of a promise from Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez to again push for a bill to legalize abortion in the country’s legislature. That legislation was on the verge of being introduced in March when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in the country, forcing its postponement.
Current law in Argentina prohibits abortion, except when the mother’s life or health is determined to be in danger, or in cases of rape.
In a controversial move, Fernandez’ appointee as Minister of Health, Ginés González García, issued new protocols on abortion Dec. 12 2019, widening the circumstances for a legal abortion.
Speaking to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Senator Silvia Elías de Pérez, a pro-life leader in the country’s legislature, stressed that “today’s march has been very positive.”
The senator said that a 2018 bill that would expand legal protection for abortion in Argentina was defeated in part because of “a huge number of Argentinians who throughout the country came out to defend their ideas, their rights, to say that in Argentina every life matters and that being born in Argentina should not be a right only for those who are wanted.”
Argentina’s May 2018 March for Life events drew an estimated three million participants in multiple cities across the country.
The 2020 digital march, Elías de Pérez said, can serve “as a new point of departure” helping pro-life groups to “get back on track again, back to work, because we have to take up the fight again.”
The senator lamented that “it is extremely sad, dramatic, that in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, in which we are fighting for people’s lives, it still occurs to a government to send (to the legislature) this kind of anti-life initiative.”
“So what’s important once again is to put our minds and passion at the service of this cause, which is the noblest of all because it means fighting for the preservation of the human race, understood as preserving life in all its stages” she said.
The digital march, which lasted about two hours on Facebook and YouTube, featured the participation of well-known pro-life leaders, including Mexican actor and producer Eduardo Verástegui.
The actor said that in all the pro-life forums he participates in, “the message I always give is to take the word pro-life to its fullest meaning.”
“Of course we have to defend life in the mother’s womb, defend the most important and fundamental right, the right to be born, because if you’re not born you can’t enjoy any other right,” he said. “But we pro-lifers don’t stop there, because after that, who’s next? Homeless children, there shouldn’t be one more child on the street, and that depends on us, on everyone,” Verástegui said.
The Mexican movie star also urged eradicating the crime of human trafficking as well as helping teens addicted to drugs and abandoned or abused mothers.
To be pro-life, he continued, is to care “for the lives of the sick who don’t have the resources to pay for a good doctor, for adequate treatment,” and to advocate “for the lives of those who are falsely accused and in prison.”
Defending life also means, Verástegui said, doing something for “the lives of the elderly who are abandoned in a nursing home, sad to death because not even their family members come to see them.”
“To be the voice of those who have no voice, to defend those who cannot defend themselves” is to be pro-life,” he emphasized.
A version of this story was first publish by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
CNA Staff, May 31, 2020 / 12:10 pm (CNA).- The Venezuelan bishops published an exhortation May 28 calling for “a consensus among all and an inclusive national accord” to save the country from “immense national, material, institutional and social catastrophe.”
Under the socialist administration of President Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela has been marred by violence and social upheaval, with severe shortages of food and medicine, high unemployment, power outages, and hyperinflation. Some 4.5 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2015.
In their message, “A voice is heard of someone crying bitterly,” the bishops said that “the country is near economic bankruptcy of profound proportions” which “it won’t be able to come out of, unless all people definitively demand answers from the authorities and the entire political, social and cultural leadership, and a national emergency is declared.”
The bishops underscored “it is unacceptable for the situation we’re living in to continue,” and that what is most urgent in view of “the immense catastrophe” in all areas is “far reaching moral action, an ethical shake-up, and a socio-political convergence” that sets the country on the right course.
The bishops pointed out that change will not be achieved “by eliminating those who think differently”, but “including all political factors and the different institutions in the search for concerted solutions”, along with a “new spiritual climate and renewed leadership” that will ward off corruption.
“Disunity and perennial confrontation aggravate the situation and sink us further as a people,” they said.
Given the situation, the bishops called for “an inclusive long range national accord to save Venezuela from the extremely grave crisis it is engulfed in and to initiate processes to rescue and recover the country socially, politically and economically.”
“Economically we see the country adrift, without economic plans in view of the possibility of companies closing down and many workers losing their jobs; the same is true of workers in the informal economy (that operates outside the system) which is the majority of them. Without daily sustenance, there will be more hunger and suffering in families,” the bishops alerted.
“The moral unsustainability of the current situation requires that radical change,” they stressed.
“The best contribution that we as citizens can make to the country is that working from our social institutions, we participate in the search for a way out (…). This will imply new political leadership that guides the country towards progress and lets go of suffocating and toxic ideologies that create suffering and death. Thus, hope will be reborn with a merciful and Samaritan disposition,” the country’s bishops proposed.
The situation in Venezuela is “very problematic” the bishops said, due to COVID-19 pandemic the country is experiencing, in addition to “the ravages of serious economic, political and social problems that are intensifying every day.”
“The presence of the pandemic has only made more evident the numerous shortages the people are suffering from, as well as the inability to provide adequate responses to them, besides the partial solutions which are necessary but insufficient, since these ills must be pulled up from the roots.”
The bishops noted that the lockdown and social distancing have “managed to stop the spread of the disease for a time,” but in the last week, “the number of those infected has increased alarmingly.”
Although the majority of the population “has behaved in a very civic-minded manner,” abiding by the prevention protocols, nevertheless “an immense cry” can be heard from the millions “without economic resources, food, medicine, work, adequate supply of electricity, running water, transportation, cooking gas and fuel.”
“It is necessary to prepare, as soon as possible, with the broad participation of all social sectors, a roadmap to lift the lockdown that includes making it easier for workers to get to their jobs, reactivating the economy and commerce, the progressive opening of the churches for liturgical celebrations, in compliance with the prevention protocols that the health emergency calls for,” the bishops said.
They also stressed that the “crisis cannot be managed only as a weapon of social and political control” where human rights violations are allowed.
Social unrest due to “the numerous shortages has been expressed in various protests that at times have been repressed with violence, but hunger can’t be contained with repression,” they pointed out.
At the conclusion of their message, the Venezuelan bishops pointed to Venerable Dr. José Gregorio Hernández–soon be beatified–as a model who “encourages and inspires us to follow the path he took as a man, doctor and Christian committed to his people.”
“José Gregorio is a symbol of the unity of the country and the path of hope. May the Virgin of Coromoto, the patroness of Venezuela, bless us at the culmination of this month of May dedicated to so many Marian devotions and may she intercede before God for the end of the disease and the deep crisis we are going through,” the bishops said.
A version of this story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
Bogotá, Colombia, May 28, 2020 / 08:21 pm (CNA).- Salesian ministries in Bogota, Colombia, have joined forces to feed the families of the children and young people they serve at the Saint Francis de Sales Oratory youth center, which they run in the poo… […]
CNA Staff, May 27, 2020 / 04:29 pm (CNA).- A Costa Rican bishop has warned that although same-sex marriage has been legalized in the country, the Catholic Church will continue to proclaim the truth of God’s plan for sexuality and marriage.
Despi… […]
CNA Staff, May 26, 2020 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- The Mexican state legislature of Nuevo Leon passed an education reform bill May 21 to foster a “respect for life from conception to natural death” in students.
The law reflects the state constitut… […]
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