Bishops wait before carrying out threat

Victorian Catholic maternity wards remain open a year after warning

VICTORIA’S Catholic Bishops have pointed to “extraordinary hypocrisy” in hospitals where people’s lives are being saved in one section while babies are being killed in another.
In a 2,000-word October 22 statement marking the one-year anniversary of the Victorian Abortion Law Reform Act 2008, the Bishops told the faithful to continue lobbying politicians on the lack of protection for women and the loss of medical practitioners’ right to conscientious objection.
While Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart said in September 2008 that “it is difficult to foresee” how maternity and emergency departments in Catholic hospitals could continue to operate under the circumstances imposed by the abortion bill, Catholic hospitals in the State remain open a year later.
Australian Catholic Bishops Conference President Archbishop Philip Wilson also warned that the future of Catholic social services were now in doubt after the bill was passed.
In their October 22 statement this year, Victoria’s Bishops said they are still waiting for medical regulations that would implement the Abortion Law Reform Act 2008 and which will indicate the extent of the legal difficulty doctors and nurses face.
They added that the legality of this coercion is open to question.
“The medical profession is corrupted when doctors and nurses are entangled in the taking of innocent life, either by abortion or euthanasia, both of which are strongly promoted by elements in the media and some politicians,” they said.
“Medical students are compromised when abortion becomes an essential component of their training. Are pro-life Victorians to be excluded from obstetrics and gynaecology?”
Archbishop Hart said: “Every human life deserves our reverence, love and respect. From the beginning of human history, we have not been free to kill the innocent.”
Legalising abortion contributes to public acceptance of the practice, the Bishops said, and further corrupts and confuses people and may make it harder for a woman to resist abortion, especially if family or partner do not support her motherhood. “It is a grave and serious lack of love and compassion to offer women abortion rather than care,” they said.
“Many women who have had an abortion say that they would have continued the pregnancy if someone, partner, family or friend, had supported them. Sadly our society abandons women to abortion, often providing no step along the way by which they might be offered alternatives and support.
“Without those safeguards they are not really free.”
The prelates vowed that the Catholic Church would continue to pray and work to overturn the decriminalisation of abortion in Victoria and to better protect women from being coerced to accept abortion as a necessary evil.
They said that Victoria’s law, believed to be one of the most aggressively radical abortion laws in the world, is not an isolated problem but symptomatic of a “profound crisis of culture” based on the “false view of freedom” given by the dictatorship of relativism.
They called on Catholics to press for reform of a “brutal situation” and help transform Australia’s culture to a civilisation of love by following the blueprint set out by Pope John Paul II.
The late Pontiff said that culture must be founded on “the incomparable value and dignity of every human being regardless of age, condition, or race”, especially the poor, weak and defenceless.
The October 22 statement marking the one-year anniversary of the Victorian Abortion Law Reform Act 2008 was signed by Archbishop Hart, Sandhurst Bishop Joseph Grech, Ballarat Bishop Peter Connors, Sale Bishop Christopher Prowse and Melbourne Auxiliary Bishops Peter Elliott, Timothy Costelloe and Leslie Tomlinson VG.