Catholic Archdiocese: Don't Use Birth Control to Combat Zika Virus...
Yup, you knew it would happen. And like clockwork, it did. Birth control and abortions have been put off limits in advice from the Catholic church in the face of the advancing issues of the Zika virus.
As the Daily Mail reports:
Reverend Luciano Brito, a spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife, said Catholics should avoid using birth control, regardless of Zika.
According to the New York Times, he said: 'Nothing justifies an abortion. Just because a fetus has microcephaly won't make us favorable' to changing the rules.
The Catholic catechism says that any method of contraception - including abortions - that can 'render procreation impossible' is 'intrinsically evil'.
The only exception to this rule is 'natural family planning', which sees women only have sex at times in their menstrual cycle when they are less likely to succeed. It only has a 25 per cent success rate.
Catholics are awaiting guidance from the Church on what they should do, with some countries advising women to simply not have sex until the threat of Zika has died down. El Salvador has told people not to have sex until 2018
However, the Vatican declined to comment when contacted by the BBC.
Which is all very interesting because it looks like the Vatican is avoiding declaring anything that could come back to bite them. However, the local institutions are falling back on fundamental dogma and doctrine to get them through a scientific problem.
I love the cherry picking of "natural planning", as if anything a natural animal makes or does in any other way is somehow unnatural. An interesting counterpoint is also raised in the DM:
Not all Catholic leaders agree, with other reverends saying families should be able to use contraception in exceptional circumstances like the ones seen in countries hit by the virus.
Reverend James Bretzke, a professor of theology at Boston College, said: 'The polemical approach, that contraception is devious or demonic in origin or the smoke of Satan, may ultimately not be the best pastoral approach.
'In Catholic Church teaching, some would say it would be acceptable to try to prevent conception in cases like this.'
Will be interested to see how this develops. Mind you, they didn't learn from HIV/AIDs in Africa...
[caption id="attachment_7178" align="aligncenter" width="550"] By Beth.herlin (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]
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