In early October, members of the executive committee of the Colombian bishops’ conference were discussing the conditional support they were planning to give to the “Colombia Plan”—a key US-financed program to bring peace and stability to the country—when the legal advisor of the Episcopate, Andres Arango Martinez, stormed into the room with news that would dramatically change the priorities in the bishops’ list of concerns.

Unexpectedly, President Andres Pastrana—a well known Catholic—had signed and approved a new Penal Code in which the Liberal Party managed to insert into the last few lines of an article a text that, in practice, legalized abortion in Colombia.

There was even more bad news: the population-control organization ironically named Profamilia (“pro-family”), a local subsidiary of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), announced that the National Institute for Medicines and Food—the Colombian equivalent to the US Food and Drug Administration—had granted permission for the legal distribution of “emergency contraceptives,” a euphemism for a pill that causes an early-term abortion. Profamilia will commercially distribute the pill starting next January.

At that moment, the bishops understood that, despite the threat to the lives of Colombians posed by rebel groups, paramilitaries, and drug-trafficking organizations, another greater threat was menacing the lives of Colombians, this time in their mothers’ wombs. “The first problem was to start a legal battle against an already approved Penal Code which basically said that abortion was not legal . . . but legal,” says Arango Martinez.

In fact, article 123 of the new Penal Code clearly states that abortion is a crime, but article 124, according to Arango Martinez, completely contradicts the previous one. Article 124 says: “The punishment applied for the crime of abortion will be reduced by three-fourths when pregnancy is a result of a sexual act, artificial insemination, or zygote transference without consent.” It immediately adds: “In the formerly described cases, when abortion takes place in extraordinary motivational conditions, the judiciary official can drop all punishment if necessary.”

“Technically, what article 124 is doing is legalize abortion, because the State determines that, in so-called ‘extraordinary’ circumstances, it can refrain from applying the due legal punishment, a measure not taken in the case of any other crime,” explains Arango Martinez. “That is to say, only in the case of abortion, a judge can totally drop the punishment, which is in practice an open door to do so on almost a permanent basis,” he adds.

The problem with “emergency contraception”
Regarding the new “emergency contraceptive” promoted by Profamilia, Msgr. Jaime Restrepo, Secretary of the Life and Family Commission of the Colombian Bishops’ Conference (CEC), explained that “a simple norm released by a government agency is basically legalizing abortion as opposed to the Constitution and the pro-life sentiment of most Colombians.”

In fact, despite Profamilia’s claims that the new pill “is in no way a means for abortion, but only to prevent an undesired pregnancy,” a council of physicians consulted by CEC revealed that the “emergency contraceptive” contains a drug known as Levonorgestrel, which acts in the woman’s body three days after sexual intercourse by preventing the embryo from implanting in the womb. In other words, it kills the new human being.

Msgr. Restrepo said these two separate events—Article 124 of the Penal Code and the new pill—are far from a mere coincidence. On the contrary, he believes that feminist and pro-abortion groups declared a “low-intensity war” immediately after the UN’s Beijing+5 Conference held in New York earlier this year. On the occasion of the summit, the bishops’ conference and First Lady Nohra Puyana De Pastrana agreed to establish a new way to handle women’s issues in dialogue with the Family and Life Commission of CEC. That sudden change in policy irritated feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) accustomed to controlling Colombia’s position at international forums and leaving the Church out of the loop.

“Several NGOs harshly complained that the Church was ‘interfering’ with women’s issues, and some of them decided to join forces with other political and social groups to launch the most aggressive campaign ever to legalize abortion,” Msgr. Restrepo explains.

One of the most important allies of pro-abortion groups has been the influential newspaper El Tiempo of Colombia’s capital city, Bogota, which has been strongly calling for the legalization of abortion. “Our authorities must realize that the liberalization of abortion is a commitment legally and morally acquired by Colombia at several international forums, such as the Beijing and the Cairo summits,” said El Tiempo in an editorial note written on October 2.

“Such alleged ‘commitments’ (to legalize abortion) have never been assumed by Colombia nor even supported in those documents. What exists instead is the government’s duty to secure the sanctity of the human life of all Colombians, either born or unborn,” rebutted El Pais, a newspaper which took the pro-life side in the growing debate.

Carlos Corsi Otarola, a Catholic and pro-life legislator who has been instrumental in the Congress on several occasions opposing previous attempts to legalize abortion or euthanasia, said, “Pro-life forces represent, without a doubt, the current feeling of most of the Colombian population, as all opinion polls show.” He added, “Unfortunately, the pro-abortion forces counter, as usual, with far more means and the support of the big media.”

As an example, Corsi Otarola compared the importance of the pro-abortion El Tiempo, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the country, with El Pais, a respected newspaper that reaches only one third of El Tiempo’s readership. He also compared the budget of Profamilia, which he claims “has received more foreign money than the Ministry of Health itself,” with the brave but poor Provive Colombia, the largest pro-life organization in Colombia, which has to organize several fundraising events to meet its needs.

The bishops speak out
In early October the president of the Colombian episcopate, Archbishop Alberto Giraldo Jaramillo, called members of the episcopate’s executive for an emergency meeting to evaluate the events. After the daylong gathering, a strong document was released. The document, entitled “The Eclipse of Life,” not only denounced the campaigns against life, but also called Colombians to protest.

The bishops said in the document that “a massive and aggressive campaign against life has been launched,” and claimed that article 124 of the new Penal Code “has been deliberately formulated to subtly legalize abortion in the country.”

“We want to express before the whole nation our strongest voice of rejection and protest against this grave attempt against human life,” wrote the bishops, who promised to assume “the commitment to fearlessly defend our Constitution, which guarantees the right to life to all Colombians.”

Explaining the document, Archbishop Giraldo Jaramillo said, “The state has the duty, according to our Constitution, to defend and protect each human life, especially those of the defenseless.” He added, “If the state is not willing to fulfill this commitment, anyone in civil society has the right and the duty to demand respect for the Constitution.”

“The bishops of Colombia have said on several occasions that our country is morally sick. And this moral disease is at the root of the wave of murders, kidnappings, drug-trafficking, and political violence which has turned Colombia into one of the most violent countries in the world,” the archbishop of Medellin explained. He added that “the decision to bring this violence inside the womb of Colombian women will only foster more violence and deepen our moral disease.” In fact, the bishops’ document said that “the Eclipse of Life is one of the most dramatic consequences of our morally sick country, and opening the doors to abortion will only aggravate the lack of respect for life.”

“Faced with a culture of death, the adequate therapy can only be a spiritual revival and a massive mobilization of people willing to defend the intrinsic value of human life, from its conception in the mother’s womb to its natural end by age or disease,” the document continued. “The starting point for such a therapy is, of course, the formation of the conscience with strong moral and spiritual values that have to be nurtured first by the family, but also by the school, as well as by public and private institutions.”

Explaining the objective of the document, Archbishop Giraldo said that the episcopate was clearly calling for public demonstrations in all possible cities, as well as for a national campaign to pray the Rosary during October—the month of the Rosary—in families, parishes, and movements, “to request from our Mother of Life the gift of a change of hearts among the heralds of death.”

First public reactions
Days after the document was released, the first pro-life marches took place in three major Colombian cities: Bogota, Medellin, and Cali. In all three of them, the demand was the same: keep abortion illegal, according to the Colombian Constitution.

The Ministry of Public Health tried to appease the Catholic Church and pro-life forces by stating that the abortion pill RU-486, recently approved by the FDA in the US, would not be accepted in Colombia. “The authorities of sanitary registries will not allow the import or production of RU-486, because it causes abortion, which is against our Constitution,” a statement said.

But neither the bishops nor pro-lifers were fooled by a token that clearly kept things unchanged. The bishops, in fact, quickly responded to the statement by saying that “if health authorities recognize that abortion is against our Constitution, then they should revoke the authorization given to the so-called ‘emergency contraceptive.’”

Health authorities did not respond, but a spokesman for Profamilia, Lidia Jaramillo, announced that “there will not be a back step” on the pill, and announced that it will be aggressively promoted under the name of Postinor-Dos.

Congressman Corsi Otarola has said that, despite the well-articulated campaign to legalize abortion, pro-lifers are starting to strike back. The pro-life legislator summarized the key elements of the pro-life campaign:

• Keep the pressure high through public marches called by the bishops.
• Avoid bringing the case of the new Penal Code to the Constitutional Court, which is controlled by anti-life judges, who two years ago made Colombia the first Latin American country to legalize euthanasia.
• Try, instead, to block the application of the Penal Code either by calling it back to Congress or by forcing President Pastrana to object to Article 124.
• Start a legal and medical battle to demonstrate that the “emergency contraception pill” is, in fact, abortifacient, and therefore, unconstitutional.
• Promote a better knowledge of what the Colombian Constitution says regarding the right to life of the unborn.