Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
An Italian priest pricked the consciences of abortion promoters in Italy this week after comparing abortion to brutal mafia killings and condemning lawmakers who promote the practice.
The Daily Caller is reporting on the Facebook post of Bologna priest Don Francesco Piero who wrote: “Who has more innocent deaths on their conscience, [mafia boss] Totò Riina or [abortion advocate] Emma Bonino? Morally, there’s no difference between the two.”
Father Piero was referring to Toto Riina, a mafia killer who died last week of cancer. Riina earned the nickname of The Beast in reference to his cruelty and was serving 26 life sentences for ordering an estimated 150 murders at the time of his death. Some of Riina’s victims included two anti-mafia judges and a 13 year-old boy.
Emma Bonino is a prominent abortion rights campaigner in Italy. She formerly served as Italy’s foreign minister and was a favorite in Italy’s 2015 presidential election until she became sick with lung cancer. Bonino is a big promoter of sexual freedom, abortion and divorce.
Currently, Italy permits abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy but many lawmakers have been campaigning to extend the practice into the second and third trimesters. These later term abortions are usually when the brutal practice of dismemberment abortion is used, a painful procedure that sparked a rash of new bills in the U.S. aimed at protecting the unborn when they are capable of feeling pain, which is around 20 weeks.
Rather than confront the truth in Father Piero’s statement, Bonino did what so many abortion advocates do when confronted with the fact that abortion ends innocent lives – change the subject to “women’s rights.”
She then accused the priest of insulting millions of women.
“Insults reflect on those who make them, not those who receive them,” she wrote on Twitter. “I suppose that Don Piero meant my name to represent the millions of women who in one way or another have experienced the trauma of abortion. So the offence was not directed at me but at millions of women.”
No, Ms. Bonino, Father Piero meant YOU, and those like you who promote the practice. Your crime is much larger than that of the woman who goes to the abortion clinic, for whatever reason, to have an abortion. She already knows that she has the blood of one child on her hands, which explains why so many women experience deep emotional pain after an abortion. But legislators like you refuse to acknowledge the reason for their pain – the death of innocent children. Instead of working to curb the very thing that has scarred so many women, you work to expand the practice which does nothing more kill more children and make more women suffer.
Father Piero is to be applauded for his courageous speaking of truth to power.
We can only pray that his words will bring her, and so many lawmakers like her, to genuine repentance.
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