BUCHAREST – Twenty-eight-year-old actress and model Ioana Picos has a successful and growing career, but that didn’t stop her from unapolgetically taking a stand earlier this year for a controversial cause in her native Romania – the right to life of the unborn.
Picos accepted an invitation to act as the official ambassador for Romania’s 2014 March for Life, which she said marks the first time she has publicly supported the pro-life cause, although she has supported other humanitarian causes.
Pico told Romanian LifeSiteNews partners “Studenti pentru Viata” in an interview after the march that she had “no doubts” about her decision to participate in the pro-life event, but admitted there were “moments when I prayed that everything turns out well.”
“I openly and publicly express my opinion and I take full responsibility for it, whatever the consequences,” Picos said, when asked if she was concerned that standing against abortion might harm her reputation or career. In Romania abortion on demand is legal until 14 weeks, and the acceptance of abortion is widespread.
“I think a human being who is one week into one’s development is no less than a human being two weeks in one’s development,” she explained. “It is just like saying a six-month old baby is less human than a teenager just because it is so much smaller and he cannot walk and talk yet. Does that make him have less rights than the teenager? That does not give his parents the right to kill him.”
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Picos argued that abortion, rather than assisting women, allows men to shirk their responsibilities toward women. “It’s a pity women don’t understand abortion actually deprives men of what is their natural responsibility,” she said. “Neither does abortion bring any benefits to them as women – women get to that because men refuse to take responsibility.”
Pointing out the physical, psychological and spiritual hazards of abortion and contraceptives, Picos reflected, “you can better understand what women subject themselves to because men are not willing to take responsibility for a child.”
The theme of the Romanian March for Life 2014 was “Adoption, the Noble Choice.”
“I am pro-life and I believe adoption is an extraordinary solution which caters to so many needs,” said Picos. “I’m thinking about the mothers who cannot provide their child optimum familial conditions, and also about adoptive parents who often long for a child’s love for years on end.”
Picos said she sees adoption as a great act of love. “When you love somebody, you wish them well. Therefore, if the first option – that of raising the child in its natural family – proves impossible, then the next step would be adoption,” she said. “Surely, if it could speak, no child would want to be killed. That is why, if, while she is pregnant, the woman, the mother could chose a proper family for the child, with professional help, of course, she would thus prove her love to her child.”
Picos’ said that in order to end abortion, Christians will have to target the root causes of abortion, particularly the abuse of sexuality. “We’d better raise our children according to our robust Christian values, we’d better not promote sexuality so much, we’d better remember we as humans are more than basic instinct and that, when a child appears into our life, we’d better trust God, Who gave (the child) to us with a well-designed purpose,” she said.
Read the full interview here.