Pope Francis is facing criticism from abortion activists across Europe this week after he likened abortion to “hiring a hitman” to kill unborn babies.
The pope made the impromptu remark Wednesday at the Vatican. ADF reports the pope’s abortion comments were not in the text of his prepared weekly homily. Instead, he appears to have spoken from the heart about the pervasive violence against unborn babies.
“Is it right to hire a hitman to solve a problem? You cannot, it is not right to kill a human being, regardless of how small it is, to solve a problem. It is like hiring a hitman to solve a problem,” the pope said.
His strong condemnation of abortion upset abortion activists and prompted responses from the French Medical Council, the German family minister, a British ethics professor and many others.
Breitbart reports the French Medical Council sent a letter to the papal nuncio to France, claiming Pope Francis’s “very harsh words about abortion … greatly disturbed the French medical community.”
Dr. Patrick Bouet, president of the council, blasted the pope for stigmatizing the medical community.
He wrote:
“If I understand that his Holiness, in the name of his faith, wishes to defend important principles for the Church he leads,” Bouet said, the French Medical Council “cannot accept that an anathema be cast in this way on the entire medical profession, which is thereby stigmatized.”
The Council “cannot tolerate that the physical, psychological, and moral suffering experienced by women in distress, sometimes in great suffering when they resort to abortion, be denied,” Dr. Bouet said.
German Family Minister Franziska Giffey also slammed the pope Thursday, Deutsche Welle reports. She joined the German professional association of gynecologists in expressing outrage about his description of abortion.
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“Stigmatizing these women as contract killers is absolutely unacceptable,” Giffey said. “Accusations and insults are the wrong way.”
CNS News reports American mainstream news outlets did not appear to report the pope’s comments as widely as those in the rest of the world.
According to its analysis:
The only major dailies to report this story were the Boston Globe, which picked up the AP article, and the New Hampshire Union Leader. To my knowledge, that was it. The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—all of which never miss an opportunity to report the pope’s most liberal-left statements—appeared to say nothing.
The rest of the world did not share the disinterest shown by American newspapers. This story on the pope made papers in Australia, Canada, France, England, Scotland, Ireland, South Africa, Kenya, and India.
The disinterest that the American media have in reporting such stories is not grounded in indifference; rather, it is ideologically based.
In the past, Pope Francis often has condemned abortion, describing aborted babies as victims of a “throwaway culture.”
The Catholic Church teaches that every human life is valuable from the moment of conception to natural death because human beings are created in the image of God.
