The Archbishop of Santiago de Chile, Mons. Fernando Chomali, questioned the recent statements of the President of the Nation, Gabriel Boric, who announced that at the end of the year he will present a project to legalize abortion in the country.
Last Saturday, justifying that “the women of Chile deserve to have their right to decide,” the president Boric He called for “a democratic debate on sexual and reproductive rights.”
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“Despite the fact that some male deputies oppose it, during the second semester we will introduce a legal abortion bill, which we will submit to the corresponding discussion,” he announced, “with the commitment that encourages our government to move forward and not go backwards.”
With a column titled “Let’s take care of the life of the unborn,” published in The bookcasethe Archbishop of Santiago de Chile warned that “those who argue the secularism of the State to defend their ideological positions did not do so when the Church defended the rights of so many people whose rights were fiercely violated.”
Faced with the voices that “advocate that free abortion—eliminating a human being before it is born—be a woman’s right,” and to do so they appeal to “dramatic cases,” Bishop Chomali considered that “the dilemma mother or child is scarce,” and those who defend abortion “insist on that point to move people’s feelings and numb their reason.”
“Why are they going to force the mother or the doctor to choose one life at the expense of the other, and the weaker one? When that situation occurs, a doctor must do everything humanly possible to save both lives,” she said.
In the case of pregnancy resulting from rape, the prelate stressed that “practicing an abortion has no justification,” because “to one case of injustice, rape, another is added, the deliberate elimination of the innocent, the weak.”
The prelate explained that what is sought is “free abortion in all events” and declared: “At last the debate began in earnest.”
“What’s behind all that? That the woman, by virtue of her autonomy, has the right to decide whether the life she leads within her continues to live or not. That is the underlying issue,” she stressed.
“Some think that their life is worth more than that of a developing human being, forgetting that they themselves went through that stage in their lives.”
The archbishop, who is also an expert in Bioethics, recalled that the embryo “has an independent life, it is different from the father and mother, it is a new human being with its own genome and already sexually defined as a man or a woman.”
“They are also untrue when they say that legalizing abortion will end clandestine abortions. “They are missing the truth when they say that he is a potential human being.”
“Today, more than ever, doctors should be clearer in their position in favor of life,” he considered.
“The time has come to be honest,” said Bishop Chomali, and assured that it is “absurd” to think that a crime can be solved by declaring it legal, while recommending that those in favor of abortion “study more biology and philosophy.”
“If we do not defend the most basic of rights, which is that life be respected from the moment of fertilization until natural death, there will be no reason to violate other rights that follow from this,” he insisted.
“Approving abortion in Chile will be a regression for society and we must say this clearly and unambiguously,” he concluded.
Juliet Villar
I am a journalist, with a degree in communication from the National University of La Matanza in Argentina. I have work experience in non-governmental organizations. Since 2016 I have been dedicated to Catholic journalism, first at the Argentine Catholic Information Agency (AICA) and, since 2022, as ACI Prensa correspondent for Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia.