Public debate on Ukrainian Catholic leaders' initiative to ban abortions

Representatives of Ukrainian women's organizations wrote an open letter addressing the leadership of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic Church of Ukraine, namely, the Rev. Sviatoslav Shevchuk and Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki, concerning their call for a ban on abortions in Ukraine, The Day informs.

The letter reads: “We … hereby express our negative attitude and adamant objection to your urging the Verkhovna Rada to ban abortions in Ukraine.” The authors do not approve of abortions but believe that “women must not be denied a choice; they must make their own decisions in regard to their body and destiny.”

The authors – among them leaders of women’s movements, heads of consortiums, organizations, psychologists, experts on gender equality, etc. – believe that “this ban will not make women give birth to children they do not want to have; it will give a strong impetus to illegal abortions, raising health risks … a ban on abortions will become a greater evil than abortion… By referring to abortions as acts of genocide you blame such women for a deliberate destruction of Ukrainians – women who resort to abortion as a last resort, being in a desperate situation, having no alternative, rather than doing so as a whim. You appear to forget that women aren’t to be blamed for the current situation in Ukraine, which is best described as a demographic crisis. Our population is on a downward curve because of a high death and emigration rates…” (This is a response to the Rev. Shevchuk’s statement on www.pravda.com.ua: “Over the 20 years of Ukrainian independence we have consciously and deliberately murdered 40 million children. In other words, the Ukrainian nation, numbering 40 million, ceased to exist over this period. Compared to this statistic, the children who have been born in the past 20 years are survivals, ones who have been fortunate enough to escape from their parent’s murderous hands.”)

The authors of the open letter insist that the UGCC hierarch uses unverified and overstated statistics: “Official statistics point to a quick (six-sevenfold) decrease in the numbers of abortions since the early 1990s, totaling some 200,000 a year.”

They ask the Rev. Shevchuk rhetorical yet topical questions: “What can the church offer a woman who is pregnant despite her will and because of circumstances? Is the church prepared to assume responsibility for the upbringing, education, and future of such unwanted children; for the consequences of such forceful maternity? Why does the church allow itself to ignore woman’s rights while upholding those of the child?”

Considering that the church forbids its adherents to use contraceptives makes it obvious that the church wants to turn the woman into a child-producing machine, so there are more citizens and above all adherents of the church.”

The authors remind that this is nothing new in history, and all such previous attempts “brought no benefit to society and suffered a fiasco, sooner or later.”

As RISU informed previously, the Synod of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Conference of the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine wrote an official address with a demand that the Ukrainian state at the legislative level confirm the right to life of unborn but conceived persons by prohibiting abortions.