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Abortion is a Crime that Must be Punished Says Vatican

New Vatican Document Warns We Are Entering a "Post-Human World"

By John-Henry Westen

VATICAN CITY, June 6, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family has published a document today which uses some of the strongest language the Vatican has employed in decades.  The introduction to "Family and Human Procreation" says: "today man has become a great enigma to himself and lives through the most acute crisis of his history in its family dimension: the family is subject to attack as never before; the new models of the family destroy it; procreation techniques jettison human love; the politics of birth control lead to the current 'demographic winter.' ... Along these paths ... we deviate towards a 'post-human' world. It is necessary to save man."

The document specifies that abortion is a crime which must be punished.  "Today people want to trivialise abortion with the claim that authorities must not penalise this abominable crime," says the 57-page document signed by Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the head of the Pontifical Council. "It is not acceptable that a crime should remain unpunished."

The document also condemns the attack on the family as the "eclipse of God".  The five-chapter document says: "Couples made up of homosexuals claim similar rights to those reserved to husband and wife; they even claim the right to adoption. Women who live a lesbian union claim similar rights, demanding laws which give them access to hetero fertilization or embryo implantation. Moreover it is claimed that the help of the law to form these unusual couples goes hand in hand with the help to divorce and repudiate,'' the document said.

The document in its first chapter speaks of "procreation" and "why the family is the only appropriate place for it".  It explains that artificial procreation is illicit since "Procreation is the means of transmitting life by the loving union of man and woman," and it "must be truly human."

The philosophical key to moving out of the culture of death, suggests the document, is "an integral understanding of what is human."  It explains, "Without a 'meta-anthropology' which touches the being, the substance, the spirit, there can be no integral understanding of what is human, because the concepts of person and being are emptied of content. Morals and religion, which are fundamental and decisive values, are reduced to a 'private matter.' The return of metaphysics is vital in order to regain a sense of what is human in man."

(with files from the Vatican Information Service, ANSA, and AP)

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