The conference warned about “the announced draft law that attempts to regulate the practice of abortion.”
In a note signed by Bishop Juan Abelardo Mata Guevara of Esteli, president of the episcopal Department of Lay Movements, the Laity, and Family Life, the Nicaraguan prelates maintained that “if our lawmakers accept such an aberration, they will establish for Nicaragua’s legislation a precedent of negation of its very principles to respect the right to life,” as the Constitution states.
Because of this, “we demand that our lawmakers, faithful to the spirit of our constitutional laws and the sense of our people, not legislate in favor of crime.”
“If an innocent creature absolutely incapable of defending himself is killed, then robbery, genocide, drug trafficking, and terrorism could be irresponsibly justified,” the episcopal statement warned.
“Is there, perhaps, any difference between a bus full of passengers that receives the impact of a car bomb and a metal instrument that impacts on the maternal womb to vacuum a fetus?” the document asks.
The bishops’ conference ratified “its position to defend the life of the unborn from the moment they are conceived in the maternal womb.”
