Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

Proponents of the culture of death are circling like vultures above their prey, calling for more legal access to abortion and even inventing a crisis in the Catholic Church over the use of birth control to prevent the birth of affected children.

According to the Population Research Institute (PRI), abortion advocates are arguing that all unborn children who may have been exposed to the Zika virus should be aborted.

The virus, which is spread by mosquitoes and is impacting a number of central and South American countries, is rarely hazardous to children or adults. It temporarily causes itchy rashes, joint pain and conjunctivitis. In rare cases, it can cause a bout of Guillain-Barre syndrome. The virus has recently been linked to a birth defect known as microcephaly, which affects the fetal brain and cranial development.

“Researchers are currently investigating the association between Zika and birth defects,” writes Jonathan Abbamonte for the PRI. “While there is little doubt the Zika infection places infants at risk of developing microcephaly, it has not yet been scientifically proven that Zika causes birth defects.”

But that hasn’t stopped pro-abortion groups from capitalizing on the crisis by targeting impacted countries where abortion is illegal.

The BBC is reporting on representatives of ANIS: Institute of Bioethics, Human Rights and Gender, partners of the New York-based International Women’s Health Coalition, who are petitioning Brazil’s highest court to demand legalization of abortion.

Another radical pro-abortion group, Women on Waves, is advertising free abortion-inducing drugs to women in countries affected by the outbreak.

Pro-abortion groups are also aiming at El Salvador, with the hopes of using the Zika crisis to pressure lawmakers into allowing abortion. As the PRI reports, the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights which is based in New York, has started an online petition demanding that El Salvador’s President Sanchez Ceren legalize abortion for women who contract the Zika virus.

Planned Parenthood, an organization that never misses an opportunity to call for the killing of the unborn, is also attacking El Salvador’s response to the Zika virus with the hopes of convincing lawmakers to reconsider their ban on abortion.

After some affected countries advised their women not to get pregnant until the virus was under control, CNN’s medical correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen, used the advice as a springboard to invent a crisis in the Church over its ban on birth control. 

Calling it a “theological conundrum”, Cohen digs up prelates and professors who disagree with the Church’s teaching on artificial birth control to confront the moral dilemma being posed to the largely Catholic women of South America.

For instance, she interviewed the Rev. John Paris, a bioethicist at Boston College, who believed Terri Schiavo’s husband had the right to kill her and blamed the “Christian right” for preventing her death.

In the article, Paris agrees with Rev. James Bretzke, his colleague at Boston College, who thinks the Church should take a more nuanced approach to its ban on birth control.

“The polemical approach, that contraception is devious or demonic in origin or the smoke of Satan, may ultimately not be the best pastoral approach,” Bretzke tells CNN.

To her credit, Cohen does interview Rev. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life who states very clearly that “couples have a responsibility to live according to the church’s teachings in whatever circumstances they find themselves.”

Cohen then closes her article by citing the fact that no one listens to the Church’s teaching on birth control anyway – which leads us to wonder why she wrote the article in the first place except out of a desire to inject the Church into the story just to make it look bad.

Rather than calling for ways to protect people from infection, such as providing them with efficient insecticides and mosquito netting, and promoting research into a vaccine for the virus, proponents of the death culture are resorting to their typical prehistoric mindset that mimics ancient populations who killed anyone who was even remotely different or inconvenient.

But at least they’re more humane about it – or so they think. Instead of tossing them out on a hillside to burn to death in the sun or be picked apart by crows, now they just slice the “undesirables” to pieces while still inside the womb, or pump their mothers full of known carcinogens so they can avoid getting pregnant in the first place.

We can only pray that more civilized minds will prevail in this crisis and provide the affected with the common sense help they need to maintain their good healthy during this outbreak until a more permanent solution can be found.

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