“It is an unfair law, which we cannot support. It is our duty to go on insisting, in a positive way, on the value of life”: thus the Portuguese bishops spoke during their plenary assembly in Fatima. Those words were exactly pronounced by their president, Msgr. Jorge Ortiga. They criticized the abortion legislation which was recently approved by the Portuguese parliament, after the referendum. According to the bishops, “not only does the juridical setting of the new legislative text decriminalize abortion, but it makes voluntary interruption of pregnancy a right, a legal conduct which the State may actively support”. On recalling that “there are neither unchangeable, nor irreversible laws in democracy”, Msgr. Ortiga complained about “the missing introduction of a body for compulsory advice which might work as persuasive element by proposing practicable alternative options, without questioning the free choice of women”. In this respect, he promised, “the Portuguese Church commits itself to respond to this trivialization of the abortion practice through a double action and a double effort by all the Christian communities, with the aim of supplying sympathetic and concrete support to pregnant women and to the families in difficulties, having to face the burden of a further maternity”.
