Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Buenos Aires (Agenzia Fides) - As Argentina’s Parliament discusses a proposed Bill to make compulsory the “free distribution of the ‘emergency contraceptive pill’” the Institute of Bio-Ethics of the Faculty of Medical Science of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, has appealed to legislators to reject the Bill and recognise the “inestimable value of human life and responsible freedom.
In a statement presenting a series of legislative, scientific and anthropological considerations against the Bill, the Catholic Institute warns that the Bill is being discussed without the due preliminary responsible debate organised in other countries regarding the issue and that "the dignity of the person and indisputable right to life must be recognised and safeguarded by positive laws". Therefore the Institute of Bioethics and many other realities “which recognise scientifically and ethically, the right to live as a primary right”, calls on legislators to make laws “in keeping with the truth about the human person and which safeguard human freedom which can only exist when there is respect for every life and the whole life”.
It says “the human embryo is a living human subject, an existing human person, with a well defined identity, different from both mother and father. As such the embryo has a right to life and any intervention against the embryo violates the right to life”. In this sense “no end, even a supposedly good end, can justify and end which causes the death and elimination of a human person”.
“Women and all citizens have the right to access clear and objective information with regard to all the possible effects of the day after pill to enable them to decide consciously and according to conscience, on the attitude to take to this pill”. (RG) (Agenzia Fides 7/12/2006; righe 23, parole 331)
