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Vatican Announces Global Campaign for a "Moratorium" on Abortion

Push will begin in western hemisphere

By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

January 25, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Vatican has announced that it will begin a global campaign to institute a United Nations moratorium on a abortion, which will begin in Latin America.

The plan was announced Thursday by Columbian Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica.

Trujillo will be going directly to heads of national governments as well as organizations throughout  Latin America, in an attempt to convince them to sign a petition to the United Nations to halt abortions worldwide.  The Cardinal intends to continue from Latin America to the United States, Canada, and then to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. 

The widening campaign began in December in Italy at the suggestion of Giuliano Ferrara, a non-Christian journalist who was once the head of the Italian Communist Party in Turin (see recent LifeSiteNews coverage at http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jan/08010712.html).  Ferrara pointed out that the United Nations was calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, and that, based on the same concern for human life, it made sense to also call for a moratorium on abortion.

The call was then published in Ferrara's, il Foglio, and was echoed by Italian Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the Italian Bishops' Conference, and L'Osservatore Romano. Many Italians responded in writing, endorsing the project, and a campaign was begun by parliamentarians in Italy from both sides of the political divide.  Now, Cardinal Trujillo is seeking to take the campaign to his own hemisphere and beyond.

"If the Church, as well as the UN, is against the death penalty, this is the principal reason to remember that it is a sin to kill an unborn baby," the Cardinal told La Repubblica.

"We will begin in Latin America and we'll meet with governments of every ideology, including marxists and socialists, because abortion is not an Italian or European problem, but a global one, and the Holy See wants to eliminate it," said Trujillo.

Trujillo's first stop will be Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, where Catholics and Protestants united successfully in recent months to stop the legalization of abortion.  The Dominican Republic is one of several nations in Latin America where direct abortion is completely illegal, a list that includes El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Chile.

The Cardinal plans to invite politicians to discuss the topic when he arrives.  "We aren't talking about an Italian law," he explained, "but rather a drama that reaches the consciences of everyone: the death of an innocent person in in the womb of his mother."
 

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