Vatican Preparing New Document on Abortion Effects on Women

VATICAN, July 31, 2010 (CNA/EWTN News).- The new president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Archbishop Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, announced that his dicastery is preparing a document on the effects of abortion on women, often called post-abortion syndrome. The document will focus on the study of the "habit of abortion" and is expected to be published next year.

In an interview with L'Osservatore Romano, Archbishop Carrasco discussed a few details of the new document. "We believe that in studying this issue, a distinction must be made. The existence of post-abortion syndrome is a well known fact that has already been developed in much literature. I am referring to the state of depression that isolates many women who have undergone an abortion," he said.

"It often manifests itself through anxiety or other more serious conditions," the archbishop noted. "It is true that abortion, in addition to killing an innocent person, profoundly affects the conscience of the woman who undergoes it. It is a question, then, that cannot be ignored, especially from a pastoral point of view," he added.

There is another aspect "that must be considered among these pathologies that for us is also very dangerous. It is spoken of very little and is of less concern to the public, and even to the scientific community," the archbishop continued, "and that is the grave phenomenon of the habit of abortion."

The problem, he said, "was made manifest in all of its gravity when 20 years ago, after the devastating earthquake in Armenia (1989), a team of doctors from the Sacred Heart Catholic University traveled to the region to provide medical assistance and discovered that many women had undergone as many as 20 abortions or more. For them, having an abortion had become something like having a cup of coffee. Thus they talked about the dramatic phenomenon of completely erasing any moral sensitivity to the issue of abortion."

This tragedy "could spread to the European populations in the wake of the recent commercializing of the pill RU 486," Archbishop Carrasco warned. "There is no question that facilitating its use could result in the banalization of abortion and the transformation of unwanted pregnancies into something akin to a bothersome cold that can be taken care of with a pill. What I mean is what happened in that country could happen in European countries," he said.