VATICAN CITY, MAY 28, 2002 (Zenit.org).- «Reproductive health» policies which promote abortion, among other things, are a risk to health itself, the Vatican told the World Health Organization.
Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragán, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, addressed a WHO meeting held in Geneva from May 13-18, and analyzed the ideological causes of such policies.
«The neo-Malthusian mentality against life must be pointed out as a patent risk against health,» the archbishop said. «It is found in reproductive health policies proposed especially for the Third World.»
The archbishop said that these ideological positions imply a «mistake in the conception of what the quality of life is, which in some places has led to the legalization of euthanasia.»
After analyzing current health risks — including infectious diseases, addiction to tobacco, alcoholism, drug addiction, cancer, mental illness and others — Archbishop Lozano Barragán mentioned that WHO is concerned with three aspects of health: physical, mental and social.
«A major risk is that they be considered as locked-in in themselves, or that more importance be attached to one as opposed to another,» the archbishop said.
«We could say that health depends on their harmony,» he added. «This harmony impels a going out of oneself and using one´s physical capacity and psychic transparency to create social and environmental solidarity.»
«The global plan of life and health that harmonizes everything is what some of us call the spirituality of health,» he continued. «It consists in overcoming individualist self-preoccupation to live for others.»
«It is a dynamic tension toward harmony, to create new conditions of life and, consequently, of health for the whole of humanity, giving preference to the poorest and neediest. It consists in creating the international common good of health,» Archbishop Lozano Barragán concluded.
