It is a battle that has been waged for 40 years. Even prior to the 1973 passing of Roe v. Wade, and perhaps especially today, the matter of the moral, spiritual, political, and logistical aspects surrounding abortion has been—and remains—a hot-button issue worldwide. It can be even attributed as the cause to the Catholic Church’s increasingly right-wing policy shift in the late 1960s, the effects of which the world is still feeling today. While it could be said that the National Organization of Women (NOW) and Planned Parenthood have spearheaded and been at the center of the Pro-Choice camp, the Holy See (the governmental power residing over Vatican City) has been at the very public center of the opposition.

            Consider the Vatican; it sits in its own little enclave of the world, residing over the world’s largest sect of Christianity, and attaching itself to some of world history’s biggest political scandals. In the mid-1500s, it was Henry VIII’s audacious split from the Catholic Church in order to divorce his wife and form the Anglican Church. More recently, it is the Church’s reaction to the rape of a nine year old and her subsequent community-supported abortion that is causing a stir internationally.

            The girl, who has remained unnamed, became pregnant with twins after being repeatedly molested and raped by her stepfather over several years (sadly, repeated sexual abuse is still very much a worldwide problem), and went on to terminate the pregnancy in early March, to much fanfare and criticism on the part of the media and the Vatican, respectively.

            The disapproval on the part of the Brazilian Roman Catholic Church went so far, in fact, as the excommunication of all parties (doctors, parents, etc) involved in securing her the option and reality of terminating the pregnancy. The church, as per usual, denounced the act and its supporters as morally repugnant no matter the extenuating circumstances. “Life must always be protected,” said senior Vatican representative Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re in support of the Brazilian church’s decision. “It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated,” he continued.

            Both the Vatican and the Brazilian Roman Catholic Church has stuck with the defense that, despite the girl’s age, the pregnancy could have been carried full term and delivered by Cesarean Section.

In Brazil, where 74 percent of the population is Catholic, abortion is illegal except in cases of rape or the unlikely survival of the mother. This case represents both. Not only was the situation resulting in the pregnancy itself terrible, but a nine year old bearing twins is not likely to survive pregnancy, even in today’s world of advanced technologies and rampant C-Sections. A girl of her age has neither the body nor the psyche mature enough to see a pregnancy to full term without serious threat not only on the life of the mother, but on any fetus as well.

“The doctors did what had to be done: save the life of a girl of nine years old,” said the current president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Amen to that. But although President de Silva—who is a devout Catholic himself—and the local and international media both side with the young girl, very few from within the clergy have spoken up in protest. The one exception I was able to find was Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who is ironically the head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, and is highly against abortion. In this case, however, he states in the Vatican’s newspaper that the girl “should have been above all defended, embraced, treated with sweetness to make her feel that we were all on her side, all of us, without distinction.”

Archbishop Fisichella brings up an interesting point, going on to describe the Church’s very public treatment of the situation as something that “unfortunately hurts the credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy.”

In fact, the Catholic Church, most specifically the Vatican and the Holy See, have long been at the center of such draconian policies (see: birth control, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, ad nauseum), driving many away from the religion, or at least the institution revolving around it. The church presents itself as such a one-sided entity that it becomes easy for people to become ostracized or put-off.

The church, however, as an international political and religious entity, still commands the obedience and worship of one-sixth of the world’s population. In religious terms, the Pope himself is supposedly infallible, and to ignore the proclamations of himself and his office as the irrelevant ramblings of a radical would be a very grave mistake.

Here, they name the moral villains of the scene as the girl and the people who aided her in her physically necessary abortion. What of her stepfather? A man who has emotionally and physically scarred a helpless child for life can still be forgiven by the church and God, but the abortion merits excommunication. This entire issue harbors the question: a rapist can repent but the victim cannot? Where is the justice—spiritually, logically, and otherwise—in that?