Abortion is an "abominable" crime and as such should be punished, the Vatican said on Tuesday in a new document on the family. In a comprehensive overview of Catholic ethics in the area of the family and reproduction, the Vatican railed against an alleged tendency in modern society to see abortion as an ordinary, or even "banal", act.
"Taking this line means denying that the crime... requires a punishment," said the text, which was prepared by the Pontifical Council for the Family, the Vatican department which deals with family issues. "It is not acceptable that a crime should remain unpunished," it continued.
The document - Family and Human Procreation - did not say what sort of punishment should be meted out to women who
undergo abortions and the doctors that perform them. The Catholic Church has always opposed pregnancy terminations, saying that they are equivalent to murder because human life begins with conception.
Most Western countries, including Catholic Italy and Spain, allow abortions as long as they take place in the first few weeks or months of a pregnancy. The Vatican's unhappiness with this situation was reiterated in the new document. "Today people want to trivialise abortion with the claim that authorities must not penalise this abominable crime," it said.
This sort of approach meant "transforming a crime into a right," it concluded.
The document also blasted other phenomena which the Vatican sees as threatening to the family, such as the legal provisions now available in many European countries to allow 'gay marriages' and juridically recognised unions between
unmarried couples.
Such things represented "the eclipse of God", it said.
Another of the Pontifical Council for the Family's targets was assisted fertility treatment. This was said to open the way for genetic manipulation as well denying a human being the right to come into the world by natural procreation.
The publication of the document, which sets out clearly the Church's thinking on many sensitive areas, comes a month ahead of the World Meeting of Families, an international Catholic congress to be held in Valencia, Spain. Pope Benedict is scheduled to attend the close of the congress on July 8-9.
