Two law professors from the nominally Catholic Georgetown University have published an article on a university website this week calling on the World Health Organization (WHO) to recommend birth control and abortion in response to the Zika virus outbreak in South America in order to “truly respect the dignity and health of women of childbearing age.”
The authors state that it is “critical” that countries be required “to respect, protect, and fulfil women’s health-related human rights, including reproductive rights,” which include “accessible, affordable, acceptable, and quality abortions.”
The article, titled “The WHO Must Include Access to Birth Control and Abortion in its Temporary Recommendations for Zika-Associated Public Health Emergency of International Concern,” was posted on Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law blog website.
Lawrence O. Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute and university professor at Georgetown, and Alexandra Phelan, an adjunct professor in global health law and doctoral researcher with the O’Neill Institute, coauthored the piece.
“The Director-General’s Temporary Recommendations should include a directive to countries to ensure that women at risk of Zika virus infection have access to birth control and safe abortion,” the article states.
Pro-abortion groups are already seizing on the Georgetown publication as a further justification for their crusade to have abortion-on-demand legalized throughout Latin America.
In its advocacy of abortion as a solution to the Zika health crisis, Georgetown joins the international abortion giant Planned Parenthood, which is exploiting fears surrounding the Brazilian Zika crisis to push for the relaxation of abortion laws in Brazil and elsewhere.
Though Georgetown boasts of being “the oldest Catholic and Jesuit institute of higher learning in the United States,” it has repeatedly come under fire for having sacrificed its integrity and Catholic identity on the altars of the secular academy.
William Peter Blatty, author of “The Exorcist” and a graduate of Georgetown University, submitted a petition to the Vatican in 2013 asking church officials to strip his alma mater of the labels Catholic and Jesuit because it had abandoned its Catholic identity.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in fact, declares abortion to be “gravely contrary to the moral law” and is one of the very few offenses that incurs automatic excommunication.
Earlier this week the Brazilian Conference of Catholic Bishops said that there is “no justification whatsoever to promote abortion” as part of the response to the Zika virus, and made clear that the promotion of abortion “in the cases of microcephaly, as, unfortunately, some groups are proposing to the Supreme Federal Court” shows a “total lack of respect for the gift of life.”
“Nothing justifies an abortion,” said the Rev. Luciano Brito, spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife in Brazil. “Just because a fetus has microcephaly won’t make us favorable.”
Apparently, Georgetown knows better.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome