QCOSTARICA – The Episcopal Conference of the Catholic Church in Costa Rica (Conferencia Episcopal de Costa Rica) has fired its first gun in a new campaign against in vitro fertilization (fertilización in vitro – FIV, in Spanish) of women to confront a bill to be presented by the Solís Administration permitting the medical practice.
The country is in violation of a Human Rights decision urging the congress knock down the prohibition.
The Administration has tried to present the bill during the special Legislative Assembly session from December to April but the opposition has blacked it every time. The church Sunday placed 50,000 pamphlets against the practice in its churches across the nation.
“Beginning in 1882, Tomas Guardia abolished the death penalty…” reads a phrase from the pamphlet, referring to the Costa Rican chief of state who struck down the death penalty, an abolition that has remained in various constitutions since then. By this, the church intends to equate the practice with death.
What bothers the church is that some sperm and eggs suffer a natural abortion in the practice of extracting the eggs from the mother and uniting them with sperm from the father. Unused eggs are also destroyed. But natural abortions, respond pro-fertilization activists, are also normal on the course of living.
Episcopal Conference material clearly equates opposition to the practice as being pro-life. Catholic purists, believing that a human zygote is the same as an adult, equates the practice to abortion, about which it also disagrees with President Solis’s Citizen Action Party, the socially most liberal political group in the country.
Catholics plan a march next Saturday in Cartago to express their opposition. The opposition places the country, however, in an awkward position of disobeying the InterAmerican Human Rights Court (Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos – CDIH) which ordered the country to legalize in vitro fertilization in November of 2012 because poor women cannot afford to travel abroad to have the procedure.
The Diocese of Cartago, led by the of Bishop of Cartago and responsible for Pastoral Family Home, José Francisco Ulloa, will hold on Saturday March 28 march against this medical technique.
Article by iNews.co.cr, with editing by the Q.
Source:nacion.com
